[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 19, 2003, at 12:25 AM, Naveen Kumar Kaushik wrote:

> just a related query
> both distclean and maintainer-clean targets  leave ethereal.core and
> tethereal.core in doc dir.
> Is this by design.
Most of the stuff in Makefile.in isn't designed by us, it's designed by 
the Automake developers and the maintainers of the GNU coding 
standards.
I presume they don't believe in cleaning up random files that aren't 
part of the build process; if so, then it's by design.
Yes, you read correctly - they're not part of the build process, unless

	1) you're running on a system that uses what I think is the 4.4BSD 
convention for core files, i.e. "{program_name}.core"
and

	2) there's a bug in Ethereal and Tethereal that causes it to crash 
when run (with the appropriate "-G" option) to generate the list of 
protocols and fields for use in the man page.
If you have those files, then you probably did a {Free,Net,Open}BSD 
build with a version of Ethereal with a bug in it that caused a core 
dump.  You might have done that a long time ago; you'd have to check 
the modification times on those files to see if they came from a recent 
build.  If they have modification times more recent than the top-level 
"ethereal" and "tethereal" files, they probably came from a recent 
build; use gdb on the executable file and the corresponding core file 
to see where the bug is.  If they don't have modification times more 
recent than the top-level "ethereal" and "tethereal" files, they're 
probably left over from an old build.