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How to build a source tarball that includes symbolic links?



Hello,

I'm trying to build my first cross-distribution package, but I run
into the following problem.

The source of my project includes symbolic links to other source trees
(notably, the CppUTest framework and a library used by several of our
projects). When I call `dpkg-buildpackage` to build a debian package
out of my project, I've found that `dpkg-source` will not follow the
symbolic links and leaves them as empty files in the source's tarball.
As a result, they cannot be used by `pbuilder` to build the package
for another distribution.

Digging further, I believe this is because the default behavior for
`tar` is not to dereference symbolic links unless explicitly told to
(with `-h`). I was unable to find any way to pass this extra option to
`tar` when building the debian source's tarball.

I've also asked the question on StackOverflow
(http://stackoverflow.com/q/10917214/1428) but to no avail.

What am I doing wrong here? Is it possible to build a debian source
tarball whose origin includes symbolic links? If so, how?

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David Lindelöf, Ph.D.
+41 (0)79 415 66 41 or skype:david.lindelof
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