Re: Add support for EXTRA_DIST_LINKS

[madmurphy]

*“What can EXTRA_DIST_LINKS achieve that AC_CONFIG_LINKS cannot?”*

With AC_CONFIG_LINKS() symlinks are present only in a configured package,
but a developer might want that symlinks are present before launching
configure, or even before launching the bootstrap script.

True about the development system typically supporting symlinks. But what
if a developer wants to package something *for another developer*? It is
not unusual to have a non-bootstraped “dev” version of a package
circulating among developers (without the configure script – only
configure.ac and Makefile.am), together with a bootstraped version
distributed for the general audience (*with* the configure script). I do
that regularly.

There must be a way to preserve symlinks if explicitly requested, it is not
possible that Autotools forces grown up developers to launch tar manually
when they want to package symlinks. I even agree with the fact that when a
package is distributed to the general audience or distro maintainers it
should have all its links dereferenced, but I also believe that Autotools
should offer a way to preserve symlinks when explicitly requested.

I was thinking that an idea could be to change my patch in order to
preserve symlinks only under --enable-maintainer-mode. There must be a way.

--madmurphy