I was thinking that an idea could be to change my patch in order to
preserve symlinks only under --enable-maintainer-mode.
Seems ok to me, in principle. (Jim?)
The problem with making EXTRA_DIST_LINKS available in general is that,
invitably, packages will wrongly use it when creating tarballs for
public consumption. Thus I think it needs to be enabled only
conditionally.
For that matter, I'm not sure --enable-maintainer-mode is enough, but a
whole new strictness level ("developer") seems like overkill, and I
don't have any other ideas.
package something *for another developer*?
[...] I do that regularly.
What symlinks do you actually use, in practice,
in such "developer tarballs"?
Also, there are some relatively minor shell unportabilities in the
patch, such as (just glancing through):
+ @if [ -n '$(EXTRA_DIST_LINKS)' ]; then \
It is Automake style to use "test ..." instead of "[ ... ]".
+ LINKDIR="$$(dirname "$${LNKPART}")"; \
It's not necessary to assume the dirname or basename commands, so we
don't. Sed suffices. Also, we don't use $(...), but `...` (in
user-level code).
+ TGTABS="$$(realpath -m "$${TGTPART}")"; \
We can't assume realpath. Many systems do not have it.
+ while [ "$${TGTABS#"$${COMMONS}"}" = "$${TGTABS}" ]; do \
Such "advanced" variable expansions as "#" cannot be used.
Thanks,
Karl
