On Saturday 18 December 2010, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > Hi, > Hello Behdad.
> Currently, automake doesn't set any of the various *CLEANFILES variables. > Since the "+=" syntax is not portable when the variables are not initialized > (and causes an automake warning), this leaves no option for Makefile.am > snippets from various tools other than using the *clean-local targets to do > their cleanups. The problem with this is that it's imperative as opposed to > declarative. > I agree this might be quite annoying sometimes. > I've been maintaining a pieces of Makefile.am snippet called git.mk: > > http://git.gnome.org/browse/pango/tree/git.mk > > What it does is to generate .gitignore files based on what "make > maintainer-clean" removes. However, because of the problem stated above, > I cannot simply aggregate the various *CLEANFILES variables and also have > to add support for individual tools (autoconf, automake, libtool, gtk-doc, > gnome-doc-utils, mallard, intltool, and gsettings so far). > Note that the *CLEANFILES variables cannot be used to remove directories, so, for your approach to be really useful in all cases (i.e. also be able to git-ignore generated directories easily), a similar set of *CLEANDIRS variables would be needed. And IMHO adding them would be a good idea regardless of your particular use case. > If instead automake was changed to always pre-initialize *CLEANFILES > variables, all snippets could just append to do variables and my git.mk > snippet would be more generic and much more simpler at the same time. > So I want to suggest that automake be changed to initialized *CLEANFILES > if the Makefile.am doesn't initialize them explicitly. > If the change you propose can be implemented without breaking backward compatibility (and I think it probably can), then I'm all in favor of it. I'd like to hear Ralf's opinion on this before taking any further action, though. > In another note, if that change is made and my git.mk simplified to not have > tool-specific logic in it, it would be a great addition to automake itself. > > Cheers, > behdad > Thanks, Stefano
