: could we reconsider this?  i do agree that NOCLEANDIR shouldn't affect
   : this, but sometimes you Just Don't Want To Do This, and it's nice to
   : have the knob available..  TOOLS_NOCLEANDIR?  or something.
   
   The cleandir step in tools/ happens at a different time than it does in the
   rest of src/ -- tools/ only does that immediately before rebuilding an
   out-of-date tool.  Why would you want to disable that step, given my
   comments about version skew risk?


the main reason is that if i'm hacking one of the tools, i don't want
to be forced to rebuild it from scratch if i can help it.  as it appears
to stand today, if i change gcc some how, i'll have to rebuild it all
the way from scratch.  that's a problem.


.mrg.