Re: [PATCH] Work around a bug in Solaris make's file-inclusion mechanism.

[Dave Hart]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 22:59 UTC, Stefano Lattarini
<address@hidden> wrote:
> At Thursday 15 July 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> No, the patch should not modify initial double slash, that is not
>> the same as a single slash in general.
> Why?

I hope it's not rude for me to dive in from a lurking position.  The
"Why?" is ambiguous, but I can address the assumed question "why is
initial double slash not the same as a single slash in general?"

There are likely systems out there where

/a/path/to/file

is equivalent to

//a/path/to/file

but on some systems the two refer to different namespaces, with
//a/path/to/file being a reference to file "file" in directory "to" on
share "path" of fileserver "a".  That is, just like \\a\path\to\file
would be interpreted by Windows' networking.

Cheers,
Dave Hart