Re: INSTALL-CVS

[David Masterson <David.Masterson@synopsys.COM>]

>>>>> Richard Stallman writes:

> Perhaps disks are big enough nowadays that people don't need
> to delete their tar files.  Maybe that means `make clean' is
> less needed than it was 15 years ago.

Well, deleting a tar file is not often a big deal as it's probably on
a backup tape or in a snapshot directory or can easily be downloaded
again.  Because 'make' is timestamp based, 'make clean' is *sometimes*
necessary to get something rebuilt properly if you hack the Makefile
(which is what a re-configure potentially does).  The level of
'clean'ness needed is dependent upon how radically the Makefile is
hacked.  It's also sometimes needed because a source file is changed
(as in 'cvs update'), but a target in the Makefile that depends on the
source file doesn't explicitly state the dependency (usually a bug in
the Makefile, but sometimes purposely done).

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA