Re: Problem with symlinks and VPATH Builds

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2002 15:25:36 -0500
> From: "Mark D. Roth" <address@hidden>
> 
> On Thu Aug 01 13:46 2002 -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> > Hmmm, time for a CANONICALIZE_PATHNAME macro?  Bonus: it could be
> > made to work with pathnames other than directories.
> 
> This is a really good idea.  Adding this macro would kill two birds
> with one stone: it would provide a way for user macros to handle the
> problem, and it would also allow us to easily fix autoconf to do the
> right thing.

The macro would be a nice thing to have, but I'm not sure that I agree
that it is "the right thing" for Autoconf to use it by default.
Generally speaking, I prefer to use logical paths when possible (e.g.,
on my host, "/reb" rather than "/net/cog-office/project/reb").  I
dislike tools that insist on rewriting my nice, short file names into
a more longwinded canonical form.

And it's not simply a matter of a personal preference for brevity: in
some cases, the canonical paths are not portable from one host to
another, whereas the logical paths are.  This is due to NFS
automounting gymnastics.  I've heard that the same thing also happens
with AFS.