ant real-clean doesn't clean up fully

It was by design as initially we wanted to allow people to independently build the components (and because we wanted to unify components and the external libraries required for testing). "real-clean" which should probably be named "clobber" was just aimed at nuking all distributions, intermediate files and generated files.

I am not sure if we still want independent building of component or not. Even so it would probably be best to create another clean target "really-quite-clean" that did "real-clean" aswell as removing components.properties and any generated dirs

Even stranger, if I remove the invallid components.properties manually, it doesn't get regenerated and I can't see any place in the tree where it is generated. Can I get a working build structure again without doing a fresh checkout?

The code to regenerate components.properties is in a macro defined in build/base.xml from memory (setComponentConfig or similar?). Look for a <propertyfile file="${components.file}">... somewhere in that file. This macro is usually called from the "build" target for the particular component (i.e. build/classpath.xml) that is called from "ensure" in same file which is called from the main build file.

I normally delete the entire components directory to get it to rebuild (and use the cache to avoid downloading everything again).

Ian, that does sound like a problem that should be dealt with by the build system. When I look at this stuff it just reminds me why I prefer an autotools system (e.g. the host files have hardcoded paths for binaries).
Is the cache system documented somewhere?

Peter, if it is supposed to work like that, then it seems to be broken I'll delete components.properties from my svn build I did last night and check the result to be sure.

Building trunk and then deleting components/components.properties gives:

BUILD FAILED
/home/andrew/projects/java/classpath/jikesrvm/build.xml:228: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/home/andrew/projects/java/classpath/jikesrvm/build/base.xml:98: Value of classpath.lib.dir property is invalid. (${x86_64-linux.classpath.lib.dir}).

This is without a clean.

Bitten by this, too.

Comparing a fresh checkout with the copied over build directory suggests that only the folders components and target differ. Deleting those should be back
to fresh state...

And yes, I think the build chain leaves much to be desired, when one comes from make + X.

Here is an attempt at a patch. The patch introduces two new targets:
1) a new clean target called cleanest that deletes the components
2) a target called purge that deletes everything

The patch is untested because I did not know how I could properly test it.

Applied Erik's patch in 10406:fd9c1d08fa64.