idaholab/moose

Update Makefiles to copy files that are symbolic links

Opened this issue · 1 comments

Motivation

Regression tests for applications may need to point to data files that are outside the test/tests directory, but those files may not be copied over during make install, and even if they are, the relative path may not be correct.

Design

If any file that is outside the tree (e.g., test/tests) is a symbolic link, have the install process copy the file rather than creating a symbolic link to it.

Impact

This should have minimal impact. The main downsides are:

  • If there are large numbers of symbolic links to large files, the space required for an installation could be large.
  • Perhaps more importantly, the fact that there is another file identical to the copied file would get lost.

This is the Grizzly PR that will rely on this: https://github.inl.gov/ncrc/grizzly/pull/765