RE: why doesn't vpath %.c subdir// work?

[Mark Galeck (CW)]

>Why not use case as the marker, as in \some\path\MARKER\blah\blah? It

Good point, but in my case, I have to use something that I may need to prepend 
and/or append to directory paths, without any effect.  

>What strikes me as the basic source of the discord here is that GNU
make is an open source project and at some point people are expected
to UTSL. In this case it's pretty clear that though your use case is
legitimate and creative, no one else has ever particularly cared about
keeping multiple consecutive slashes; most people would just use
$(realpath) and call it done. It's pretty much axiomatic that if you
have an open source project with a bug which only one person cares
about, it's up to that person to supply the fix. ISTM that an hour or
so in the debugger would locate the source of the problem even for
someone who doesn't know the insides of GNU make well. Or perhaps
compare the outputs of "make -d" with and without the double slashes.


Hmm, this is interesting, thank you for bringing this up David.  I have two 
comments:

1.  This (and other) open source projects, are used in corporate environments, 
where certain version of the project is installed, and users cannot just 
download a new version without approval.  If I use a particular fixed feature 
of GNU make, I cannot populate it across the company without everybody else 
downloading the latest version, which in practice makes it impossible to use a 
fixed feature, until the IT department downloads the change for everybody, 
which can be very delayed.  

2.  Pardon the naivety of this question, but I have never edited any open 
source project:  Are you saying I could just download the sources of GNU make, 
make and test the fix, and upload it back?  What about the approval of the 
maintainers of the project?  I see version 3.81 as current from 2006, but there 
must have been a gazillions of the contributions since then, why are they not 
merged to the master download then?