BUG CLAIM in make 3.80: vpath breaks with "./" in path start

[Matt England]

At 11/22/2005 12:11 PM, I wrote:
> VPATH/vpath: does it work for -l<libname> prereqs?
> I can get it (VPATH/vpath) to work for single-directory library 
> dependencies (I think), but when I start adding a list of directories for 
> which I want VPATH/vpath (either or both, vpath with %.a, %.so, or %), 
> things break down.

Preliminary result of my root-cause analysis of my symptoms is in:

GNU make's vpath directive does not accept "./" at the beginning of a 
directory path, at least for the first directory path provided (it probably 
fails for successive dir-paths, but I have yet to test that).

In other words:

vpath %.a my_tgt_lib_dir other_dir
vpath %.so my_tgt_lib_dir other_dir

works, but:

vpath %.a ./my_tgt_lib_dir other_dir
vpath %.so ./my_tgt_lib_dir other_dir

does NOT.

(Note the <other_dir>...that's because my Makefile's have multiple lib-dir 
dependencies...and I have yet to test with only one dir in the vpath, so 
I'd thought I'd make my docs specific to my problem. I bet the single-path 
scenario fails, anyway.)

I'm running GNU make 3.80 in CentOS 4.0.

Is this an acceptable problem/feature?  If not, I'd like to have this fixed 
and a new cut of GNU make made (or at least available in source 
download).  I want to spare others the problems of what I just went through 
trying to figure out why some of my repositories worked just fine and 
others did not.

-Matt