[Distutils] setup.py clean questions

[Jeremy Hylton]

I am still a relative novice with the distutils.  I used the clean
command today and was very confused by how it works.  I don't know if
my confusion is over the clean command or over the specific setup
script.  

The setup.py was from Andrew's ZODB package.  Let me know if my
problem is specific to that package.

This setup script is used for several packages, including C extensions
and straight Python.  When I run "python setup.py clean", I get a
bunch of warnings, e.g.

    warning: clean: 'build/temp.linux-i686-2.1' does not exist - can't
    clean it

I don't know what a build/temp.mumble is nor why I should care if it
can't be cleaned.  If it doesn't exist, it seems that I shouldn't have
to be warned that it was cleaned up.

Despite all these warnings, nothing has actually been cleaned up.  The
ExtensionClass build directory, which contains a bunch of .so files,
still have all the .so files in it:

    ~/src/zodb> ls -R ExtensionClass/build/
    ExtensionClass/build/:
    lib.linux-i686-2.1/

    ExtensionClass/build/lib.linux-i686-2.1:
    Acquisition.so*     MethodObject.so*  MultiMapping.so*	Sync.so*
    ExtensionClass.so*  Missing.so*       Record.so*	ThreadLock.so*

In yet another directory, I have some leftover build files from Python
2.0.  There doesn't seem to be any way to remove these.

A meta-question, of course, is what the current status of
documentation is.  I can't find any mention of the clean command in
the documentation on python.org.  Is anyone currently working on
these?

Late in the process, I decided to read the source and discovered a
--all option to clean.  That indeed got rid of most of the stuff I was
interested in, but spewed even more warnings about directories that
didn't exist.  It did not, however, remove the 2.0 directories.

Jeremy