GAR build system and bug #31002: make picks wrong pattern rule

[Brian Gough]

Hello,

I just wanted to report that the change to shortest-stem pattern
matching in make-3.82 breaks the GNU-make based build-system, GAR.
I'm using GAR to build all the released GNU packages on the GCC
compile farm (http://chapters.gnu.org/~bjg/gsrc/summary/).

The GAR makefiles were written using the order-based matching and
pretty much rely on it (example below).  I'm not sure they can be
easily modified to work with make-3.82 so some way to get the old
behavior for compatibility would be appreciated.

-- 
Brian Gough

Example: there's an http//% target at the top of the GAR Makefile so

  make http//ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/patch-2.6.1.tar.gz

would always match it and download patch-2.6.1.tar.gz under make-3.81.

Under make-3.82 this fails whenever the url happens to end in a string
that matches another pattern rule in the Makefile (e.g.  patch-%).
There are many other pattern rules (approx 100) and the URLs are
arbitrary so it's a real problem in practice.

# download an http URL (colons omitted)
http//%: 
        wget $(WGET_OPTS) -O $(DOWNLOADDIR)/$(notdir $*).partial http://$*
        mv $(DOWNLOADDIR)/$(notdir $*).partial $(DOWNLOADDIR)/$(notdir $*)