make cannot handle prerequisites that contain a colon

[Markus Kuhn]

GNU Make 3.80 (as shipped with SuSE Linux 9.1)

BUG1:

The GNU make 3.80 manual lacks a section on quoting of special
characters that describes how any arbitrary byte sequence can be
provided as a prerequisite or a target in a rule. There are only brief
discussions on how to quote % and $, but not on how to quote other
bytes.

BUG2:

I tried to specify a target named 'a::b':

  all: a::b

  a\:\:b:
        touch $@

This leads (presumably correctly) to the error

  Makefile:1: *** target pattern contains no `%'.  Stop.

So I have to escape the :: somehow. But how? I did not succeed in
getting past the syntactic restrictions of make. I tried both

  all: a\:\:b

which let to

  make: *** No rule to make target `a\:\:b', needed by `all'.  Stop.

as well as

  TARGET=a::b
  all: $(TARGET)

which led again to

  Makefile:2: *** target pattern contains no `%'.  Stop.

Giving up ... Is there a way to specify an arbitrary sequence of 8-bit
bytes (other than those containing \0) as a target?

I'm apparently not alone with this problem:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2004-06/msg00138.html

Having :: as part of a target is a perfectly normal thing under Unix,
e.g. for man pages of Perl classes.

I believe that the ability to specify any arbitrary filename in a Make
file is so important that any esoteric backwards compatibility problems
that a solution to this problem might create would be quite justifyable.
Fundamental tools, including make, really need 100% filename
transparency using a simple and well-documented quoting mechanism.

The obvious suggestion would be to use either \ or $ as an escape
symbol, and to provide a command-line option for backwards
compatibility.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain