bug#13524: Improving user experience for non-recursive builds

[Peter Rosin]

Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> Fine as well.  And of curse, if you want to speed thing up and have more
> control on the final result, feel free to shepherd the pending patches to
> the agreed form ;-) -- which if I'm not mistaken is:
>
>   - make the series consist of only two patches, one introducing the
>     feature (complete with documentation and NEWS additions, plus your
>     original test case), and one follow-up patch implementing my
>     testsuite enhancement;
>
>   - use the '%...%' form, and prefer lower-case for long names (so,
>     '%reldir%' a.k.a. '%D%' and '%canon-reldir%' a.k.a. '%C%').

Done. I didn't address the canonicalization concern raised by Miles. That
seems like a bigger issue than this patch series. However, If that naming
is changing, it must be done before this series lands in a released
version, or we'll end up with bad comptibility hacks...

Cheers,
Peter