Re: More control over 'make dist'

[Peter Rosin]

On 2016-09-14 11:33, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> I'm a libvirt devel and I've ran into interesting problem. I'd like to
> hear your opinions on it.
> 
> Libvirt is a virtualization library that uses XML to store a virtual
> machine config. We have couple of tests in our repository too that check
> whether XML configs are valid, and whether some operations change it in
> expected way. Some operations don't change the XML at all, in which case
> we just symlink the output file to point to the input file:
> 
> ln -s $xml.in $xml.out
> 
> However, I was looking into archive produced by 'make dist' the other
> day and found out that the symlinks are not preserved. I've traced down
> the problem and found that autoconf is just hardcoding some of tar's
> options. Namely -chf. Yes, it is -h that causes a symlink to be
> dereferenced.
> 
> So my question is, what do you think of making -h configurable? We could
> add new tar-* option to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE, say tar-symlinks, which would
> suppress -h on tar's command line.
> 
> What are your thoughts?

I believe that is for the benefit of supporting unpacking the release
tarball on systems that do not support symlinks, or where symlinks are
not as flexible as one might wish for.

Cheers,
Peter