Re: Add support for EXTRA_DIST_LINKS

[madmurphy]

Hi Jacob,

Thank you for your reply. I am aware that symlinks and GNU coding standard
don't go well together, but I believe that there is a difference between
inviting to a standard and force to towards it. I am really convinced that
developers should be left free, and a written warning in a manual should be
more than enough.

With my patch symlinks get still dereferenced unless listed explicitly in
EXTRA_DIST_LINKS, and a package containing random symlinks will still
contain only normal files with make dist. The only difference is that I
introduce the ability to do something different if explicitly required.

All the packages I maintain have AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([gnu]) in their
configure.ac file, but Autotools allows also to have
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign]), and I believe that is a good thing. In the
same way I believe that allowing to create symlinks, even as an exceptional
thing, is a good thing too.

--madmurphy