[coyotos-dev] Behavior of "make clean"

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

The current Coyotos tree can contain builds for multiple binary
architectures at the same time. This raises a question about the
behavior of "make clean" and "make distclean". Should these targets
remove only the architecture that is currently configured, or should
they remove ALL architectures?

My intuition is that "make distclean" is designed to generate a
distributable source tree, and it should therefore whack everything, but
I think that "make clean" should probably whack the current directory
(and subdirectories) for the currently configured target architecture.

But this raises a secondary question. We currently accept "make
distclean" from any directory, with the behavior that the distclean
proceeds from the top. If "make distclean" whacks all architectures,
then we need a new target name meaning "whack the whole tree for the
current architecture". Perhaps "make tree-clean".

So some questions:

  1. Is there agreement that "make distclean" should leave a fully
     clean tree where *all* builds have been cleaned?

  2. What target name should be used to whack the whole tree only for
     the current architecture? "make tree-clean" is clear but awkward.

  3. Alternatively, should we go back to the "one tree per build"
     approach?


shap