Re: autoreconf --clean

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello David, Bob, all,

* David Byron wrote on Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 05:41:30AM CET:
> On Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 9:33p, Bob Proulx wrote:
> >
> > Given a source directory project-X.Y build in a different
> > directory.  Frequently beside it but could actually be
> > quite far away.
> > 
> >   chmod -R a-w project  # Just to show that it can be read-only
> > 
> >   mkdir debug-build
> >   cd debug-build
> >   ../project/configure CFLAGS=-g
> >   make
> > 
> >   cd ..
> >   mkdir opt-build
> >   cd opt-build
> >   ../project/configure CFLAGS=-O
> >   make
> > 
> >   cd ..
> >   rm -rf debug-build opt-build
> 
> This makes sense but what if we assume that we're starting with configure.ac
> and Makefile.am instead of a configure script and Makefile.in?  At this
> point the source directory can no longer be read only, correct?

I don't think you can expect a read-only source directory to work well
in practice unless you start from an extracted tarball of a package, as
opposed to: an autoreconf'ed CVS/whatever source tree.  Usually the
latter will work once you've done at least one instance of
  ../source-tree/configure
  make

to have all files up to date that are generated in the source tree.

But at that point, you can use maintainer-clean as well.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf