The clean target

[Richard Hughes]

On 14/03/07, Stepan Kasal <kasal at ucw.cz> wrote:
> Hello,
>   I noticed that the MAINTAINERCLEAN variable contains Makefile.in,
> at least in some subdirectories.  (One of the side-effects of the
> gtk-doc patch, if I have not missed something.)
>
> I do not think this is right, the `maintainer-clean' target should
> leave the tree in a state when ./configure is possible.

I always use as a general rule:

make clean: removes all generated stuff not in a tarball, still allows
user to ./configure
make distclean: removes all generated stuff not in VCS, user has to ./autogen.sh
make maintainerclean: removes some stuff that might need odd tools to
generate, like firmware headers and the like. User needs ./autogen.sh
and some odd other tools.

Maybe there's a more concrete rule of thumb on the net somewhere, but
I always thought maintainerclean nuked everything not code.

Richard.