(automake-1.16.info)Errors with distclean

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27.5 Errors with distclean
==========================

This is a diagnostic you might encounter while running ‘make distcheck’.

   As explained in Note: Checking the Distribution, ‘make distcheck’
attempts to build and check your package for errors like this one.

   ‘make distcheck’ will perform a ‘VPATH’ build of your package (Note:
VPATH Builds), and then call ‘make distclean’.  Files left in the
build directory after ‘make distclean’ has run are listed after this
error.

   This diagnostic really covers two kinds of errors:

   • files that are forgotten by distclean;
   • distributed files that are erroneously rebuilt.

   The former left-over files are not distributed, so the fix is to mark
them for cleaning (Note: Clean), this is obvious and doesn’t deserve
more explanations.

   The latter bug is not always easy to understand and fix, so let’s
proceed with an example.  Suppose our package contains a program for
which we want to build a man page using ‘help2man’.  GNU ‘help2man’
produces simple manual pages from the ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ output of
other commands (Note: Overview.).  Because we don’t want
to force our users to install ‘help2man’, we decide to distribute the
generated man page using the following setup.

     # This Makefile.am is bogus.
     bin_PROGRAMS = foo
     foo_SOURCES = foo.c
     dist_man_MANS = foo.1

     foo.1: foo$(EXEEXT)
             help2man --output=foo.1 ./foo$(EXEEXT)

   This will effectively distribute the man page.  However, ‘make
distcheck’ will fail with:

     ERROR: files left in build directory after distclean:
     ./foo.1

   Why was ‘foo.1’ rebuilt?  Because although distributed, ‘foo.1’
depends on a non-distributed built file: ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’.  ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’
is built by the user, so it will always appear to be newer than the
distributed ‘foo.1’.

   ‘make distcheck’ caught an inconsistency in our package.  Our intent
was to distribute ‘foo.1’ so users do not need to install ‘help2man’,
however since this rule causes this file to be always rebuilt, users
_do_ need ‘help2man’.  Either we should ensure that ‘foo.1’ is not
rebuilt by users, or there is no point in distributing ‘foo.1’.

   More generally, the rule is that distributed files should never
depend on non-distributed built files.  If you distribute something
generated, distribute its sources.

   One way to fix the above example, while still distributing ‘foo.1’ is
to not depend on ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’.  For instance, assuming ‘foo --version’
and ‘foo --help’ do not change unless ‘foo.c’ or ‘configure.ac’ change,
we could write the following ‘Makefile.am’:

     bin_PROGRAMS = foo
     foo_SOURCES = foo.c
     dist_man_MANS = foo.1

     foo.1: foo.c $(top_srcdir)/configure.ac
             $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) foo$(EXEEXT)
             help2man --output=foo.1 ./foo$(EXEEXT)

   This way, ‘foo.1’ will not get rebuilt every time ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’
changes.  The ‘make’ call makes sure ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’ is up-to-date before
‘help2man’.  Another way to ensure this would be to use separate
directories for binaries and man pages, and set ‘SUBDIRS’ so that
binaries are built before man pages.

   We could also decide not to distribute ‘foo.1’.  In this case it’s
fine to have ‘foo.1’ dependent upon ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’, since both will have
to be rebuilt.  However it would be impossible to build the package in a
cross-compilation, because building ‘foo.1’ involves an _execution_ of
‘foo$(EXEEXT)’.

   Another context where such errors are common is when distributed
files are built by tools that are built by the package.  The pattern is
similar:

     distributed-file: built-tools distributed-sources
             build-command

should be changed to

     distributed-file: distributed-sources
             $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) built-tools
             build-command

or you could choose not to distribute ‘distributed-file’, if
cross-compilation does not matter.

   The points made through these examples are worth a summary:

   • Distributed files should never depend upon non-distributed built
     files.
   • Distributed files should be distributed with all their
     dependencies.
   • If a file is _intended_ to be rebuilt by users, then there is no
     point in distributing it.

   For desperate cases, it’s always possible to disable this check by
setting ‘distcleancheck_listfiles’ as documented in Note: Checking the
Distribution.  Make sure you do understand the reason why ‘make
distcheck’ complains before you do this.  ‘distcleancheck_listfiles’ is
a way to _hide_ errors, not to fix them.  You can always do better.