On Fri, 2021-10-08 at 18:01 +0200, Mark Piffer wrote: > There was a discussion recently here: > > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66271761/gnu-make-wildcard-function-and-terminating-slashes-on-directory-names > > Short version: GNU make doesn't implement its own globbing (using > that which the libc is providing) and thus you can't really change > its behaviour in this regard, or at least you'll pay a heavy price.
I think you're not quite following David's request. Today if you run this makefile: all: ./foo foo: ; @echo hi make will say "hi" even though the text "./foo" does not match the text "foo" (remember make's dependency/target matching is all done using simple text comparison, _normally_ you would not expect this to match). That's because make has a special built-in feature that it is smart enough to ignore the leading "./" when matching up prerequisites and targets. But if you run this makefile: all: dir/ dir: ; @echo hi you'll get an error saying "no rule to make target dir/", because there's no special case that strips trailing "/" in GNU make, and the string "dir/" obviously is not equal to the string "dir". So David is asking that make have a new special-case rule that allows it to match while ignoring trailing slash, like it has to ignore preceding "./".
