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by pdkl95 3890 days ago
To add to this, this is the purpose of the "maintainer" targets generated by automake. To fully clean an automake project so everything is rebuilt, you want "make maintainer-clean".

Running the more common "clean" or "distclean" targets leaves not only the generated Makefile.in files, but also generated source like the generated .c/.h files from a lex/yacc parser. This is important behavior; while C compilers are available everywhere, having bison and flex (or ANTLR, or any other less-common code generation tool) installed isn't as common.