[MDEP-437] Create symbolic links instead of physical copies

[jira-importer]

Markus Karg opened MDEP-437 and commented

When copying lots of resources, especially huge ones (e. g. we are dealing with two gigabytes (!) split up into several 100 MB large binaries) it is tedious to wait until the copy task has performed real physical copies...

Since JRE 7 Java (which is public for years meanwhile) can deal with symbolic links, it would be really cool if one could add a <symlink>true</symlink> configuration option, so the plugin could simply go the fast lane and use symbolic links instead of physical copies.

For backwards compatibility unfortunately the default has to be "false". :-(

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Affects: 3.1.2

Remote Links:

• GitHub Pull Request #87
  

[jira-importer]

Michael Osipov commented

This issue has been auto closed because it has been inactive for a long period of time. If you think this issue still applies, retest your problem with the most recent version of Maven and the affected component, reopen and post your results.

[jira-importer]

Markus Karg commented

I'd like to reopen this issue as I like to provide a PR implementing a solution by providing a new goal "link" instead of "copy".

[jira-importer]

Elliotte Rusty Harold commented

Can you elaborate on what you envision here?

[jira-importer]

Markus Karg commented

I am planning to provide a PR which adds a new "link" mojo to this plugin. That mojo would work like "copy", but it does not really copy the files from the local repository to the target location (which needs lots of time with many dependencies / huge files), but it only will create a symbolic link in the target location pointing into the local repository (which looks the same to many plugins and applications, but works considerably faster. POM authors can then decide whether they actually like to copy or link, and OS-activated profiles could event provide a fallback in cases a link is wanted but the OS does not support linking in some cases (like Windows).