Re: Make CVS HEAD version build out of the box

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: grischka <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:43:36 -0400
> 
> I was thinking about this today.  It seems like it would be a useful
> thing to store a "canonical" name for a given file, even on POSIX
> systems.

That's fine, too, although it will need to use a system-dependent
method for canonicalizing file names.

> One minor nit is that make conflates "targets" with "files";
> not all targets are files and it's conceivable that you wouldn't want to
> canonicalize targets.

Why would it be bad to canonicalize non-file targets?  If Make knows
that they are not files (like in .PHONY targets), Make will not access
the canonical names.  And if it does't know, it actually tries to
`stat' them today already, which in effect is canonicalizing them,
right?