Bo Nygaard Bai wrote:

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.

How do you test whether a hard link works ? I suppose this would have to be made based on the path since you have mixed setups where some parts of the file system tree allow hard links where others don't.

I don't find hard links all that useful. Disk space is cheap and they often cause problems (e.g. in our case with symlinks in the source tree).

Here's a quick hack:

import os delattr(os, link)

This is more elegant, but requires extra work:

class mx_sdist(sdist):

""" Build a source distribution.

This version does not use hard links when preparing the source archive - hard links don't match well with symlinks which we use in our source repositories.

""" def make_release_tree (self, base_dir, files):

# Prepare release dir self.mkpath(base_dir) self.distribution.metadata.write_pkg_info(base_dir) if not files: log.warn('no files found in release !') return

# Create dir structure log.info('preparing release tree in %s...' % base_dir) create_tree(base_dir, files, dry_run=self.dry_run) for file in files: if not os.path.isfile(file): log.warn('%s is not a regular file -- skipping' % file) else: dest = os.path.join(base_dir, file) self.copy_file(file, dest, link=None)

and then register this command class as replacement for 'sdist'.