On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 at 09:34:40 +0100, Fabian Greffrath wrote: > Simon McVittie wrote: > > .PHONY: build > > isn't the "clean" rule called before anything else? Couldn't we just > remove this directory in the "clean" rule?
In this specific package, there's nothing useful in that directory and we could delete it. However, if the contents of the build/ directory were important (for instance some GNOME packages use that directory for Autotools files like config.guess) then deleting it wouldn't be a valid solution. Declaring the build target as "phony" is meant to solve this, and has worked since at least 2009, so I'd prefer to understand why that's apparently stopped working recently. smcv