Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Why do we have three different clean targets on Windows?!?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 14:35:52 -0800
Ulf Lamping wrote:
Hi List!

Having three different clean targets in all the .nmake files doesn't make any real sense and provides a permanent cause of trouble and confusion.

The differences in:

-clean
-maintainer-clean
-distclean

... sounds all very much over-engineered to me.

To be honest I don't even know what the different target differ on and what they are intended for (and I guess most other Windows developers won't know either).

They're modeled after the items produced automatically by automake, which conform to the GNU coding standards for Makefiles:

	http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Standard-Targets.html#Standard-Targets

Some of them, as you note, might not be useful in the context of Windows development, where builds aren't done as part of the "ordinary user" installation process (unlike UN*Xes, where binary packages aren't available for all platforms and combinations of additional libraries).