Re: symlinks to programs

[Simon Josefsson]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> If people are actually using gnulib-tool via this symlink trick then
> we should keep supporting it. But I'm truly curious as to who they are
> and why they want to do that rather than the obvious thing.

The Debian gnulib package has a symlink in /usr/bin that goes to
/usr/share/gnulib, and there are several source packages that invoke
gnulib this way.  While this suggest the usage exists, I don't think it
necessarily means we must continue support it -- this symlink business
has always felt fragile and like a weird way of working to me.

Btw, there are many useful tools in gnulib/build-aux/ that are useful to
users and ought to be usable from /usr/bin on a system, and I've been
thinking about adding an extra Debian package like 'gnulib-utils' that
sets up the symlink (or not...) to below /usr/share/gnulib for the tools
that I can identify as generally useful.

/Simon

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