Follow-up Comment #6, bug #61328 (project make):
Well, make isn't doing any stat: it's just comparing text. And in fact, it
can't use stat because there's an excellent chance that the filesystem object
being discussed doesn't even exist yet.
I guess I'm a little confused as to what the concern is WRT this paragraph.
The backward-compatibility issue I could imagine is something like, some
makefile is defining rules for both "dir" and "dir/" and using "dir" as
prerequisites in some rules and "dir/" as prerequisites in other rules, and
expecting them to be treated as completely separate targets... but which map
to the same underlying file (or directory).
I have a hard time envisioning what a use-case would be for that however.
I am not interested in having this special case apply only to certain types of
prerequisites such as order-only prerequisites. I also don't want to add some
kind of special flag to control this: it's just as simple to use a workaround
as to enable the special flag. It should either just be always on, or always
off, IMO. If we think the backward-compatibility problems are to severe then
I don't think we should do it.
I also actually don't agree that "directories should only/always be
order-only". There are in fact good reasons to list directories as regular
prerequisites of a target... they are just not the reasons most people do it.
It can be very useful to use directories as prerequisites if you intend to
take advantage of their particular time-last-modified rules (that the
directory is "updated" whenever any file is created, deleted, or renamed in
that directory).
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