Re: make it possible to avoid symlinks in coreutils' bootstrap

[Paul Eggert]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> Argh, it was incomplete, sorry.  Assume the first `make' causes some
> object files to be updated, say, because of a previous `make clean',
> or simply because they were out of date.  Those object files will then
> have a timestamp that is newer than the versions of the gnulib files
> that reside in the gnulib directory.  So after bootstrap, they may not
> be remade although they should have been.

Yes, but exactly the same problem exists with symbolic links.
And there are many similar problems, e.g., if 'bootstrap' modifies
a makefile this means you really have to rebuild everything.

That being said, if there are strong feelings that "cp -p" is bad, I
can change it to use "cp".  After all, I won't be using the --copy
option anyway, so it doesn't matter much to me what --copy does.
Perhaps Bruno has an opinion?