Re: [PATCH] autotools: Attempt to clean build directory when rerunning configure

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Tue, 2012-10-30 at 08:10 +0000, Richard Purdie wrote:
> How extensively has this been tested? I have a suspicion that we might
> run into a number of issues doing this throughout the tree :(

I've had this in my tree for a few weeks and the only package I've found
so far that went wrong was polkit, see separate patch for that.  (There
a few other packages for which "make clean" fails in a harmless manner.)
But it's true that I haven't built the whole of world this way yet.

>I'm wondering how many recipes will suffer from issues with "make
>clean" verses how many recipes would struggle if we defaulted 
>${B} != ${S}?

My guess is that "make clean" is slightly more likely to work (or, at
least, not break anything) on average.  But defaulting ${B} != ${S}
would definitely be a desirable thing in the longer term and I would
certainly be in favour of moving in that direction.

p.