*“What can EXTRA_DIST_LINKS achieve that AC_CONFIG_LINKS cannot?”* With AC_CONFIG_LINKS() symlinks are present only in a configured package, but a developer might want that symlinks are present before launching configure, or even before launching the bootstrap script.
True about the development system typically supporting symlinks. But what if a developer wants to package something *for another developer*? It is not unusual to have a non-bootstraped “dev” version of a package circulating among developers (without the configure script – only configure.ac and Makefile.am), together with a bootstraped version distributed for the general audience (*with* the configure script). I do that regularly. There must be a way to preserve symlinks if explicitly requested, it is not possible that Autotools forces grown up developers to launch tar manually when they want to package symlinks. I even agree with the fact that when a package is distributed to the general audience or distro maintainers it should have all its links dereferenced, but I also believe that Autotools should offer a way to preserve symlinks when explicitly requested. I was thinking that an idea could be to change my patch in order to preserve symlinks only under --enable-maintainer-mode. There must be a way. --madmurphy
