Hi Jacob, Thank you for your reply. I am aware that symlinks and GNU coding standard don't go well together, but I believe that there is a difference between inviting to a standard and force to towards it. I am really convinced that developers should be left free, and a written warning in a manual should be more than enough.
With my patch symlinks get still dereferenced unless listed explicitly in EXTRA_DIST_LINKS, and a package containing random symlinks will still contain only normal files with make dist. The only difference is that I introduce the ability to do something different if explicitly required. All the packages I maintain have AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([gnu]) in their configure.ac file, but Autotools allows also to have AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign]), and I believe that is a good thing. In the same way I believe that allowing to create symlinks, even as an exceptional thing, is a good thing too. --madmurphy
