This is a spin-off of D7930, intended to investigate the idea of working with canonical path representations throughout KDevelop.

The patch achieves this by converting paths to their canonical representation on input, currently without opt-in/out and probably not in the most efficient way.

It works on paths only; symlinks to files are left untouched.

This patch indeed makes the one from D7930 superfluous for me. For me it also triggers an apparently known issue where the parser gets confused and includes the wrong "debug.h" headers, leading to errors like Use of undeclared identifier 'CMAKE'.

the test_path unittest succeeds but would probably need to check the result of canonicalisation.

At least 2 places that could be optimised:

• the concatenation of the canonicalised file path and the file name in toCanonicalPath()
• the canonicalisation of the result of a concatenation in Path::addPath().

In theory there should be no need to make this feature optional; the patch emulates what happens at the OS level on Mac. One could consider providing a more or less visible option for advanced users to deactivate the feature if it breaks anything for them (or for optimal performance in contexts where canonicalisation is not required).