Re: install(1): Options for handling symlinks

[Pádraig Brady]

On 09/03/2023 16:31, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on the Linux man-pages Makefile, so that users can select
> if they want their link manual pages (e.g., sprintf(3), which is just
> a link to printf(3)) as symlinks or .so files (not shared objects, but
> roff(7) files with a .so request; similar to C's #include).  Until now,
> we only provided them as .so files, but many systems want their pages
> as symlinks, so I'm trying to make it easy for them.
>
> That should be easy: build the symlinks, and then install them.
> However, that seems to be incompatible with install(1), which I've
> been using until now.  It can't install a symlink --it follows it, and
> copies the real file--.  Would it make sense to you to add some flag(s)
> to do something similar to what cp(1) can do?  Otherwise, I should
> replace install(1) with cp(1) + chmod(1), but I would prefer to use
> install(1) in the Makefile, I think.

There was a previous proposal to support --preserve,
which would support this with --preserve=links.
It's not a very requested feature though,
but also not that invasive to implement.

cheers,
Pádraig