Re: make it possible to avoid symlinks in coreutils' bootstrap

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Paul Eggert wrote on Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 01:52:27AM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > A failure case with `cp -p':
> >   cd gnulib && cvs up
> >   cd .../coreutils && make && ./bootstrap && make
> 
> I don't understand this failure case.  "cvs up" modifies the
> time stamps to the current date, and "cp -p" will copy
> the modified time stamps, so it's behaving like symlinks
> would.

Argh, it was incomplete, sorry.  Assume the first `make' causes some
object files to be updated, say, because of a previous `make clean',
or simply because they were out of date.  Those object files will then
have a timestamp that is newer than the versions of the gnulib files
that reside in the gnulib directory.  So after bootstrap, they may not
be remade although they should have been.

Cheers,
Ralf