Re: More control over 'make dist'

[Warren Young]

On Sep 14, 2016, at 7:49 AM, Peter Rosin <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-09-14 11:33, Michal Privoznik wrote:
>> 
>> 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 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.

The question, then, is whether libvirt would ever be unpacked on such a system.

I’m barely aware of what libvirt does, but I think I can come up with a 
plausible scenario: libvirt built from source on Cygwin.

It appears from the home page that libvirt already supports Hyper-V, so a naive 
user might decide to build it under Cygwin rather than whatever native Windows 
toolchain is currently used for that case.  (The reason being that libvirt, 
coming from the Linux world, probably builds better under a Unix-like 
environment.)  Since NTFS symlinks have a number of unfortunate limitations[1] 
and restrictions[2], the tarball almost certainly won’t unpack correctly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link#Restrictions
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link#Limitations