cannot use stem more than once in dependency

[Jan Beulich]

Hello,

while I found that someone already asked that question in the help
mailing list (on March 1st 2002) the fact that he didn't even get an
answer points at this being a problem non-one wanted to think about,
yet. The problem is that in a pattern rule like 

%.dst : /root/%/subdir/%.src

the stem gets substituted only for the first % in the prerequisite.
This is especially strange since the documentation cartes to explicitly
state that in the target there must be exactly one occurence of %, but
while it permits having no % in a prerequisite it does not disallow more
than one occurence. Note that using

%.dst : VPATH+=root/%/subdir
%.dst : %.src

doesn't help either since appearantly pattern-specific variables are
not getting considered during the rule search.

I would be glad if you could indicate whether there is an intention to
fix this problem permanently (because obviously it is not difficult to
fix, and I could do so locally, but certainly don't want to introduce
private deviations in recognized makefile syntax), or alternatively
provide a way to work around the limitation.

Thank you very much,



i.A. Jan Beulich
Software Engineer Senior
Novell Linux Platform Engineering

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