".." anomaly in "rmdir -p"?

[Juergen Reuter]

Hi all,

I do not know if this is a bug or a feature, but suppose the following 
situation:

Assume you create two subdirectories:

mkdir dir1
mkdir dir2

Now, if you say

rmdir -p dir1

dir1 is removed as expected and no further action is taken.  Howver, if 
you instead say:

rmdir -p dir2/../dir1

(which after expansion denotes the same directory) then you get the error 
message "dir2/..: Directory not empty", probably since ".." is handled 
like an ordinary directory segment specifier.  You frequently get 
expressions like "dir2/../dir1" in Makefiles, when paths are concatenated.

I wonder, if rmdir should remove by file path expansion all occurrences 
of ".." and "." from the path before taking any further action.  This 
would avoid the above annoying behavior.  Or does the Posix standard 
demand the current behavior?

Btw., I am referring to coreutils 6.9 on a linux redhat fc7 system.

[When answering, please cc: to me, since I am not subscribed to this list. 
Thanks!]

Greetings,
Juergen