madmurphy wrote:
I have created a patch for Automake to support a new Makefile variable
named EXTRA_DIST_LINKS. The purpose of the variable is that of creating
symlinks for the distributed archive.
The syntax is very simple: a space-separated list of tokens of the form
DEST:SOURCE – it is identical to that of AC_CONFIG_LINKS(dest:source ...)
in the configure.ac file.
The GNU coding standards specifically say not to do this:
"Don’t include any symbolic links in the distribution itself. If the tar
file contains symbolic links, then people cannot even unpack it on
systems that don’t support symbolic links. Also, don’t use multiple
names for one file in different directories, because certain file
systems cannot handle this and that prevents unpacking the
distribution." (section 7.3 "Making Releases")
AC_CONFIG_LINKS makes the links when configure is run, after the
distribution has been unpacked. If I remember correctly, Autoconf also
falls back to hardlinks or copying the files if the system does not
support symbolic links.
-- Jacob
