erm, not that I say, sticking to the standards is mandatory, but... ;)

$ info standards 'Managing Releases' 'Makefile Conventions' 'Standard Targets' [...] The reason we say "almost everything" is that running the command `make maintainer-clean' should not delete `configure' even if `configure' can be remade using a rule in the Makefile. More generally, `make maintainer-clean' should not delete anything that needs to exist in order to run `configure' and then begin to build the program. This is the only exception; `maintainer-clean' should delete everything else that can be rebuilt. [...]

There should be an additional target, e.g. "make cvs-clean", or similar.

Oh blimey. Ok, I'll make it not delete configure. Cheers, Simon