Re: The drawbacks of the --symlink option

[Bruno Haible]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >   2) "tar cfvz" creates a tarball which is not self-contained. It happened
> >      twice to me today: I created a tarball of coreutils, transferred it to
> >      another system for testing, and it didn't work because the symlinks
> >      which point to a partition not available on that other system.
> >   3) Other manipulations a maintainer normally does (chmod -R or others)
> >      might not work well with symlinks.
> 
> Both of these are solved by
>   make dist
> 
> I don't think I ever create tarballs any differently

"make dist" often requires special tools to be installed, for example to
format the documentation in 'man', 'dvi', and 'pdf' format. Whereas when
doing portability testing, I don't need the documentation.

"make dist" also takes more time than "tar cvfz".

> I get mildly upset if a maintainer thinks this target is
> reserved for him alone, i.e., by requiring cvs write access to succeed.

I agree that requiring CVS write access in "make dist" is unfriendly;
however, having texi2dvi, dvips, doxygen, xsltproc & docbook installed
is sometimes - rightfully - a prerequisite for "make dist".

Bruno