make clean broken

[guimard]

Hi,

to fix (Debian #1034088), I had to recreate Makefile.PL before calling make clean (in debian/rules file):

override_dh_auto_clean:
        perl -pe 's#\@top_srcdir\@#../..#' <perl/annotator/Makefile.PL.in >perl/annotator/Makefile.PL
        dh_auto_clean

[elliefm]

curious, I wonder when/why/how it gets removed

[elliefm]

Ah, I see, it's make distclean that fails, which I can reproduce upstream...

It fails because make distclean first cleans up all the perl stuff due to it being in EXTRA_DIST, and then it recurses through the DIST_SUBDIRS and tries to make distclean in those too. At this point, perl/annotator/Makefile still exists, but it contains a high level rule that wants to rebuild itself from Makefile.PL first, which has already been removed, so it fails with *** No rule to make target 'Makefile.PL', needed by 'Makefile'. Stop.. There is no such rule because this file was never generated by make, it was generated by the top level configure.

So really, the problem is that the perl stuff is listed in both EXTRA_DIST and DIST_SUBDIRS, and so gets cleaned twice. I think the "right" place is DIST_SUBDIRS, and it should theoretically be removed from EXTRA_DIST. But we've tried that before, and the commit message of 14ce773 suggests that it's important for them to be in there after all, because it resolves a different incompatibility between the autotools top level and the MakeMaker subdirectories...

So, at the moment, I don't think there's a good solution here. We're always fighting with the autotools/MakeMaker incompatibility in one way or another, and this is just another way. I think your workaround in debian/rules is probably as good as it's going to get.

This doesn't really effects us upstream, because I think we mostly use git clean rather than any of the make [x]clean varieties.

[guimard]

Thanks @elliefm !

[guimard]

Hi @elliefm,

Things got worse with version 3.8.0. Now it is impossible to run any "make clean" without errors. This creates a Debian's Policy violation. Do you see a way to fix this?
Also some source files are deleted during build