[Buildroot] Remove clean and uninstall targets [was: Re: [PATCH 1/2] Add (Freescale) elftosb host package]

[Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout@mind.be>]

On Wednesday 14 March 2012 12:11:21 Luca Ceresoli wrote:
> Moreover, many packages do not implement the CLEAN and UNINSTALL targets:
> 
> $ git grep -l GENTARGETS package/|grep -E '^package/[a-z]'|wc -l
> 111
> $ git grep -l GENTARGETS package/|grep -E '^package/[a-z]'| \
>      xargs grep -l '_CLEAN_CMDS'|wc -l
> 51
> $ git grep -l GENTARGETS package/|grep -E '^package/[a-z]'| \
>      xargs grep -l '_UNINSTALL_.*_CMDS'|wc -l
> 73
> 
> meaning that probably they are not so interesting to everybody out there.

 Uninstall doesn't really work, as Thomas pointed out, so I'm all for 
removing it.

 For the clean target I can imagine a use case, but it's not very
convincing.  Say you're preparing a package patch the painful way 
(i.e. save a copy the source tree, modify the files of the source tree, 
and if all is well run a diff).  Then you may have some modifications 
which are not detected by make (e.g. when you're actually editing the 
Makefile).  So you want to run a make clean.  make foo-dirclean is not
possible because then you loose your changes.  This is where a clean
target could be useful.

 However, it's such a corner case that I don't think it's important.
And if you're hacking away at a package, you can afford to run
'make -C output/build/foo-0.1 clean' manually.


 Removing the clean and uninstall targets will make tab completion
slightly faster as well :-)


 So let's get rid of them!


 Regards,
 Arnout


-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                               arnout at mind be
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