bug#33573: Patch to replace symlinks with files

[Karl Berry]

Hi Bogdan,

    Someone reported a bug for this, so I simply gave it a try.

Thank you! I didn't realize you were working on some of the old bugs.
That is great!

To bring this one in particular to fruition: can you check what happens
when -c -a would need to overwrite a symlink? I think it should just
give a warning. Then the user can decide what to do.

And, can you check that automake -a -f -c does in fact overwrite a
symlink with a copy? And, I guess, that -a -f, without the -c,
overwrites files with symlinks? (Or, if it gives an error now, that's ok
too.)

And that the test checks this stuff?

Sorry, but these are the kinds of nitty-gritty things that every
automake change needs to think about.
    
    Just maybe make something clearer in the documentation and/or the help 
    message in such case, like:

Yes, agreed. No problem there.

    I'm not subscribed 

If you intend to keep working for a while on automake (I hope so), you
should subscribe to the mailing lists, especially bug-automake and
automake-patches. Unfortunately the debbugs software does not send mail
to everyone who has been on a given bug (not even the bug originator),
but only to the associated mailing list, as I understand it.

For the same reason, it is good to explicitly cc a bug's originator and
anyone else who has contributed to the bug, if you happen to have them.

    and I didn't see them in the mailing list's archive :).

I see all your messages there now, I believe:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2022-12/threads.html

As I recall, there is a delay of up to an hour or maybe more before the
archives are updated. Unfortunately it does not happen when a message is
received; there's a separate polling cron job :(.

Thanks for all,
Karl