[bug #35485] New $(.MFDIR) built-in variable

[David Boyce]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #35485 (project make):

T Murphy says:

"I think that getting the directory of the current makefile is useful although
I am sure my team have had trouble with  $(abspath) and the way it works in
some situations on windows (unfortunately our stuff has to work on both)  - it
was something to do with which drive letter got stuck on to a relative path
(e.g. off the CWD)  to make it absolute and this possibly not always being the
drive letter you wanted.  This is unsubstantiated since my emails about that
are stuck in some old Lotus notes database."

To which I say:

A. There will be such corner cases. I have a similar one with Cygwin where we
must use cygpath -a -m instead of $(abspath) to translate Unix pathnames into
Windows style. But with that said, it's no worse having a shorthand. If
abspath is broken on Windows you need to hack around it either way, or fix it
in make.

B. It might be better to use realpath instead of abspath. The differences I
know of are that the path must exist and symlinks are resolved. In this case
the directory is already known to exist and resolving symlinks might be a
feature.

C. As noted, it's possible to implement this directly in C code instead which
might help work around issues with abspath.

D. Of course if abspath itself is really broken WRT drive letters then that
should be fixed, but that's outside scope here.

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