Re: dist-hook: keeping symlinks

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Jeremiah,

* Jeremiah Benham wrote on Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 07:42:14PM CET:
> On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 00:02 -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Sat, 13 Dec 2008, Jeremiah Benham wrote:
> > 
> > > I want to include a directory that has symlinks in it. How do I include
> > > this in a tarball? I tried adding this to the Makefile.am
> > 
> > What is your plan regarding operating systems which do not support 
> > symbolic links.  Will your extracted directory tree still work as 
> > expected?
> 
> actually we have a different build script for other operating system. Is
> there anyway to perserve the links or must we do that as an
> install-data-hook?

There might be another way, but install-data-hook should be possible.
It should also be possible to write your own 'mydist' rule.  It could
depend on 'distdir' to populate $(distdir), and consist of a tarball
creation without flattening symlinks.

(I'm not actually sure whether any of the other tarball formats which
Automake supports through options, behave any different in this respect,
or whether pax would.  Don't think so, though.)

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf