[GRASS5] Re: [GRASSLIST:1299] Re: Grass 5b10 make clean

[Markus Neteler]

Gordon,

my apologies for your severe problem! I can fully understand
your annoyance as I have been facing the same problem a few
versions ago. 

On Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 06:53:27PM -0800, Eric G . Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 11:59:08AM +1100, Gordon Keith wrote:
> > I am trying to install Grass 5 beta 10 on an solaris intel box.
> > 
> > I was unable to install from the binaries so I downloaded the source and 
> > tried to build it.
> > 
> > I followed the instructions and did a "./configure" and "make install". 
> > The error.log contained a lot of entries so I decided to "make clean" 
> > and "make all" to try to track down the error messages.
> > 
> > Since make install requires root access I was doing this as root.
> > 
> > Can you image my horror when "make clean" flashed up:
> > 
> > /bin/sh -c "rm -rf /usr/local/bin/   2>/dev/null ; true"
This was o.k. for the last betas, however, we modified again the
concept (without realizing this problem).

> > 
> > and proceeded to do the same for a few other important directories such as:
> > /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/include, /usr/local/man, etc.
> > 
> > Can I suggest (in _*extrememly strong*_ terms) that wiping out the 
> > entire development environment (gcc, make etc) is NOT what most people 
> > mean by make clean.
> > 
> > Please make it a little safer for newbies to play with grass.
Definitly.
 
> I'll see if I can't convince others that "clean" shouldn't touch
> anything in the installation directories.  Apparently there must of been
> a problem in ./configure where "grass5" was not added to /usr/local.
> The intention is to remove /usr/local/grass5/bin, etc... -- though I
> don't think clean should touch those anyway.

We have planned the GNU-compliant Makefile system for GRASS 5.1.
But due to the continous problems we should consider to upgrade
now - before promising the developers have to discuss if this is
feasible. Unfortunately the current (and old) Makefile system of
GRASS is pretty poor. Luckily "configure" could be added, but all
other stuff is not yet compliant to current GNU standards. This
is a major task additionally to the ongoing bugfixing and finalizing the
upgrade to raster floating points.

We'll continue to discuss this in the grass5 developers group.
A new beta11 shall be released asap to fix this dangerous
clean problem.

I am very sorry for your inconvenience and hope you will stay with
GRASS. We'll learn from this incidence.

Kind rergards

 Markus Neteler

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