Re: [RFC PATCH v4 00/19] Modernize the build system

> On 11/13/24 11:24 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Is there a way to disable that?  These symbolic-links pretending to
> > be installed files are quite annoying---when the target file is lost,
> > the links become useless.
> 
> INSTALL_SYMLINKS=1 in the existing Makefile is of course the one true
> way... (and really, why would you expect the target file to be lost for
> any reason).
> 
> That being said, it doesn't appear the patch series implements any of
> the other multiplicity of choice in what kind of filesystem object gets
> used for multiple copies of the same file. No hardlink or copy support
> has been rigged up.
> 
> (Meson doesn't have a builtin function for performing hardlinks, by the
> way. I don't really think I've seen people desire to do this outside of
> one project being discussed right here right now. hardlinks are mainly
> good at fooling people who look at them into not understanding the
> association between the two, and at breaking across multiple
> filesystems. It's definitely impossible to get it right automatically,
> and asking users to make an informed choice here is just not something
> that projects other than git seem to find valuable, for whatever reason.
> So basically, it's fairly understandable that meson hasn't previously
> added hardlink support.)