launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Maris Fogels <maris.fogels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

So I've noticed some people have had problems with the initial build, and the 
first thing they try is 'make clean'.  However, this doesn't do what they 
expect: instead of resetting the build, it just resets the application state. 
Subsequent attempts to use 'make' still fail, because the build artifacts are 
still broken.

So, to make things easier for our developers, should we follow a more standard 
set of behaviours for our Makefile targets?

From the GNU Coding Standards: Standard Targets:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Standard-Targets.html#Standard-Targets

'clean'
Delete all files in the current directory that are normally created by building 
the program. Also delete files in other directories if they are created by this 
makefile. However, don't delete the files that record the configuration. Also 
preserve files that could be made by building, but normally aren't because the 
distribution comes with them.

'distclean'
Delete all files in the current directory (or created by this makefile) that are 
created by configuring or building the program. If you have unpacked the source 
and built the program without creating any other files, ‘make distclean’ should 
leave only the files that were in the distribution.

The standard defines 'mostlyclean' and 'maintainer-clean' targets as well.

As an example of how this would help, when someone tells us "It says I have an 
error with foo.egg", we can simply tell them to run 'make distclean; make', and 
everything will be reset as expected.

Should we make this change?

Maris

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