On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 12:20 -0800, Jeff Johnston wrote:
Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> I am testing Eclipse on F8, and I have checkout HelloWorld
> from my SVN repository and into my workspace, choosing
> GNU AutoBuild but apparently it is unable to auto-build.
>
> The error I have reported is:
>
> **** Clean-only build of configuration Build (GNU) for project
> HelloWorld ****
>
> make -k distclean
> make: *** No rule to make target `distclean'.
> Buildfile generation error occurred..
> Not possible to generate Makefile and no existing Makefile found
> Build stopped..
>
> So what is the problem
>  

A GNU Autotools project expects an existing project to have a configure
script or autogen.sh that is used to configure and ultimately generate
the Makefile.  If you do not have these files and don't plan on adding
them,  you should use either the regular Managed Make project which will
create a Makefile for you, or the Std Make project which expects you to
have a Makefile.

>From what I can tell, when I checked out HelloWorld  from SVN repository,
I had chosen the Project Wizard, the Wizard gave me two choices.
(1) C Project or (2) GNU C Autotools Project.  I chosed (2). Then entered
"HelloWorld" as the Workspace name, then the configuration Project
Type says: "GNU Autotools" and Build(GNU) is checked, then left the
Additional Settings alone and clicked 'Finish".

That is now I ended up with the above reported error.
I assume this is what you mean by 'Managed Make"?

As far as I can tell, there is no 'Managed Make" that I can see...

Regarding the clean behavior, the Autotools project default is to do a
make distclean which is a standard target in a generated Makefile for an
autotools project.  If one goes to Project ->Properties->C/C++
Build->Settings->Autotools tab you will find settings for the clean
behavior.  You can change this to make clean or have the build directory
simply deleted.  The distclean target deletes all files created by the
build and leaves others alone.  This is useful when one wants to
configure/build directly in the source directory.


I tried both clean and disclean - same error except that the 'disclean'
rule does not appear in 'clean'

The error message was given because it could not find a Makefile in your
project and there were no configuration files to generate one from.

Yes, that is correct - there is  no Makefile that is generated or existing.  I am
trying to get the 'Managed Make' to work - but cannot tell how to do this.

Thanks for responding,
Dan