Bug/Quirk in make 3.79.1

[johnd]

Could make be made to ignore repeated /s in target names?? So that it can match
a dependency dir1/dir2 to a target dir1//dir2.


Given a simple makefile such as 

 x: foo/bar/waz
        cp /dev/null $@


 foo//bar/waz: 
        mkdir -p `dirname address@hidden
        cp /dev/null $@

The command 
 rm -rf foo ; make

will fail:
 make: *** No rule to make target `foo/bar/waz', needed by `x'.  Stop.

This problem crops up a lot, where there are variables defined as 
 directory=foo
and 
rules/targets inconsistently using them as 
$(directory)/bar or $(directory)bar