[Distutils] Hardlinks v copying

[Bo Nygaard Bai]

I was trying to use the distutils sdist target on an AFS mounted
filesystem on Linux. It fails because it can't make hard links between
directories on AFS (you can inside a directory). I have not been able
to find any options to make it copy the files instead.

1) Is there a way for me to force it to copy the files into the
   temporary directory instead of using hard links?

2) Given that it is very hard to predict whether a particular usage of
   hard links is possible on any given OS/filesystem/mount combination.
   It seems to me that the best strategy would be to try to make the
   hard links, and if this fails, silently fall back to making a copy.

/Bo Bai