Re: better symlink handling

[Albert Cahalan]

On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 11:42, Paul D. Smith wrote:
> There are a number of suggestions already available in the bugs and
> patches sections of GNU make's Savannah project.  Something will appear
> in the next version of GNU make.

The proposed command line options will not do, because
users won't remember to use them. Oh, I suppose that
my Makefile could _always_ recurse once to set these
options, but that's very ugly, and it prevents using
the normal behavior for some of the rules.

I do like the idea of using the most pessimistic of
the lstat() and stat() data, as long as it doesn't
exclude pure lstat() usage or readlink() usage.

Handling this like .PHONY still looks good to me:

.LSTAT: my-symlink-rule another-rule yet-another

(with .PHONY and .LSTAT conflicting of course)