Re: [bug #42270] Make needs to canonicalise paths

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Edward Welbourne <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 03 May 2014 14:12:46 +0000
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> It remains that it is up to the author of the makefiles to canonicalise
> names - or, rather, chose a canonical way to refer to each file.  It is
> not make's job to do that.  Thus has it always been.

I agree that that's how Make always behaved, but you never explained
why it has to be so.

I think the reason is that, when the Makefile is read, we cannot
necessarily assume that the current directory will stay current when
the target is made (think recursive Make invocations with "make -C",
for example).  So Make simply is not at liberty to decide that
../foo/bar and /some/path/to/foo/bar are the same file.