On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 10:31:28PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote: When I type "make clean", the first thing that happens is that gnulib gets built. This seems to be caused by commit 49501a8888003350 "Add default to generate prerequisistes for any rule", which always build libgl, even if the target is "clean".
It should only do that if libgl is not up to date. I don't understand the goal of that commit; the commit message isn't clear to me. Maybe the goal is to build the BUILT_SOURCES and libgl.la even when some more specific target is provided to "make". I don't think that's possible without this kind of problem cropping up. Yes. Before this commit, attempting to run many targets from a clean tarball without first running "make" (from memory, I think "make check", "make doc" and "make install" were just some of those affected), resulted in wierd failures after about five minutes half way through the process. Having this default target ensures that these prerequisites are up-to-date before doing *anything*. I can understand that it's annoying in the case of "make clean". (I usually use "git clean -dfx" for cleaning) J'