AC_CONFIG_LINKS and MSVC

[David Byron]

I'm having trouble getting autoconf to do what I want when configuring
under cygwin for cccl/MSVC.  I'm trying to change the behavior of:

AC_CONFIG_LINKS(dest.h:source.h)

MSVC doesn't seem to deal with reading through cygwin links, I think
because the actual filename of the link is dest.h.lnk.  When a C file
does

#include <dest.h>

MSVC doesn't find it.

So, I want AC_CONFIG_LINKS to make a copy instead of a link.  I tried:

    AC_PROG_LN_S
    as_ln_s='cp -p'
    LN_S=$as_ln_s
    AC_SUBST(LN_S)

but that doesn't help.

I also tried:

case "$host" in
    *-*-cygwin)
        copy_links=yes
      ;;
esac

if test "$copy_links" == "yes"; then
  echo "copying source.h"
  config_cmd="cp -p $srcdir/source.h dest.h"
else
  echo "linking utlendian.h"
  config_cmd="ln -s $srcdir/source.h dest.h"
fi

AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS([foo],$config_cmd)

which seems to get $config_cmd set correctly in configure, but not in
config.status.  It feels like someone must have dealt with this before,
and probably in a cleaner way than having a separate config command for
each link.

Does it make sense to have the code that supports AC_CONFIG_LINKS use
$as_ln_s instead of straight ln -s in:

  # Try a symlink, then a hard link, then a copy.
  ln -s $ac_rel_source $ac_dest 2>/dev/null ||
    ln $srcdir/$ac_source $ac_dest 2>/dev/null ||
    cp -p $srcdir/$ac_source $ac_dest ||
    { { echo "$as_me:$LINENO: error: cannot link or copy
$srcdir/$ac_source to $ac_dest" >&5
echo "$as_me: error: cannot link or copy $srcdir/$ac_source to $ac_dest"
>&2;}
   { (exit 1); exit 1; }; }

-bash-2.05b$ autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59

Thanks for your help.

-DB