bug/feature regarding target filename resolution

[hyu]

Hi,

I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a feature. But it's annoying
to me at the very least. Targets in a makefile are filenames,
in most cases. Say I have a target a.o, and "gmake a.o" will
do the right thing. If I type "gmake ../hyu/a.o", which
presumably is the same target, it will happily report 
"Nothing to be done for ../hyu/a.o". I think that
different naming of the same target should all work.

For completeness, the toy example is:
$ pwd
/home/hyu
$ cat Makefile
a.o: a.c
        touch a.o
$ touch a.c
$ gmake ../hyu/a.o
gmake: Nothing to be done for `../hyu/a.o'.
$ gmake a.o
touch a.o
$

I'm running gmake 3.79.1. Thanks,

Hua