lSM lICE: not found

[Paul Gilbert]

Ross> The intent of "make clean" is to remove the temporaries but leave a
Ross> complete runnable R.  It is quite useful when you have installed
Ross> versions of R.  Maybe the "make clean" / "make distclean" distinction
Ross> needs to be explicit in the "INSTALL" file.

I had assumed "make clean" would leave a complete runnable R, that is my
runnable R wouldn't get messed up until I did "make" which does "install", which
can potentially mess up my running R. But I had also assumed that when I did
"make" I would be starting clean, which is not completely true it seems - at
least as far as the architecture and other stuff as determined by configure are
concerned.

I'm not sure what would be the best approach to make things easy for novices. I
don't use "make clean" very often for R and it is probably more of a utility for
developers - but I did get caught this time. My usual approach is just to delete
everything and start over with the tar file. I think, however, that anything
like "make distclean" or "make realclean" or "make acclean" is going to be even
more of a utility for developers - they all assume you are familiar with the
Makefile, or, if they are documented, that you read the documentation
(regularly, since these things change).

Probably the best thing to make it easy for novices is to have some "install" or
"setup" script which does all of the appropriate steps. This should also make
certain that everything is sufficiently clean that there won't be any mistakes.

Paul Gilbert



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