Re: [PATCH] Work around a bug in Solaris make's file-inclusion mechanism.

[Stefano Lattarini]

At Friday 16 July 2010, Dave Hart wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 22:59 UTC, Stefano Lattarini
> 
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > At Thursday 15 July 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >> No, the patch should not modify initial double slash, that is
> >> not the same as a single slash in general.
> > 
> > Why?
> 
> I hope it's not rude for me to dive in from a lurking position.
Absolutely not, on the contrary, thanks for your answer.

> The "Why?" is ambiguous, but I can address the assumed question
> "why is initial double slash not the same as a single slash in
> general?"
Yes, this was the intended question.
 
> There are likely systems out there where
> 
> /a/path/to/file
> 
> is equivalent to
> 
> //a/path/to/file
> 
> but on some systems the two refer to different namespaces, with
> //a/path/to/file being a reference to file "file" in directory "to"
> on share "path" of fileserver "a".
> That is, just like \\a\path\to\file would be interpreted by
> Windows' networking.
Thanks for the info.

---

Given the information Dave provided, it seems to me that the only way
a leading `//' could be problematic for the automake code in question
is when a file path specified in a prog_SOURCES begins with `//' (and 
this path must be put there directly and explicitly by the Makefile.am 
author, since the content of prog_SOURCES must be literal and not e.g. 
substituted by configure).

Ralf, are we sure we want to complicate the already complex automake 
code to allow for such (ab)use of functionalities?

Regards,
   Stefano