> > Currently there is no suffix treated specially by make; adding a special
> > rule for .c.a: suffix application does not seem right to me. I'd rather
> > rename the file, or remove the rules. Or even make pmake accept suffix
> > rules that don't have a suffix currently defined. 
> 
> it's worth noting that i discovered the problem with when compiling a
> cygnus toolchain tree.  Their makefiles work on a lot of platforms, so
> i don't think 'rename the file' is an appropriate response.
> 
> J.T. seemed to indicate that the .c.a rule is 'necessary' for
> compliance with _some_ standard...  J.T.?

Yes.  I added the .c.a rules to conform to POSIX.2 (see section
6.2.7.8, Default Rules). 

GNU Make, which claims to be POSIX.2 compliant, also has these rules,
and doesn't have the problems cgd has found.  So it would seem that
our make's behavior needs to be changed.

	--jtc