libtds.a missing after make clean

I just ran into an odd little circumstance that I thought others might be
able to benefit from.

I installed freetds from source using the instructions:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/freetds
make
sudo make install

And then I did something that I am used to doing but was not in the
instructions:
sudo make clean

I then tried to compile the MS SQL Server PHP extension against freetds and
was met with an error at configure time that resembled the error in this bug
report [ http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=44991 ]:

configure: error: Directory /usr/local/freetds is not a FreeTDS
installation directory

After reading the PHP manual a user posted a comment [
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/mssql.installation.php#84331 ] describing how
to copy over the tds.h and libtds.a files so that the compile will run. But
I could not find the src/tds/.libs directory. After much googling I decided
to rerun the configure and make routines and this time NOT make clean, and
lo and behold, the src/tds/.libs directory is there.

So anyone that might have the same problem as I did (where you could not
located the src/tds/.libs directory) it may mean that you cleaned it out
using make clean. And if that is the case, rerun the configure and make
routines but do NOT clean it. You should then be able to compile the mssql
extension.

-- 

Robert Gonzalez
http://www.robert-gonzalez.com