Guy Harris wrote:
The source tarball is often used to build and install Ethereal by people
using a UN*X platform for which no binary package is available (or for
which they don't want a binary package version), so it includes a number
of generated source files to allow it to be built on systems that don't
have Flex or Bison/byacc or....
Windows users are far more likely to be installing from a binary package,
so making the source build "out of the box" on Windows is less important
than making it do so on UN*X.
Whilst I agree with that, I thought the whole point of cleanbld.bat was to
allow windows developers to change the "important" bits of the distribution
to win32 without needing the full set of un*x tools. If the source
distribution is not made suitable for that, cleanbld.bat is both redundant
and offers false hope and confusion, so should be removed.
Actually, I'd go further: if you are building from source, you should need
all the tools no matter what platform you use. Isn't the whole point of the
distclean target to clean the tree back to the source shipped in the
distribution - i.e. distclean should be performed before producing the
source tarball. Doing anything else leaves the source distribution already
semi-customised to an unspecified (though I agree pretty general) target.
Neil