add symbolic links managment

I have implemented a solution for symbolic link support in maven-assembly-plugin with changes to plexus-io and plexus-archive (see my comments on PLXCOMP-117)

I added definitions to the assembly format that allow for symlinks to be defined in an assembly.xml as follows...

<symlinks>
<symlink>
<name>symlink_name</name>
<destination>../symlink_destination</destination>
</symlink>
</symlinks>

...I think this is in-keeping with other resources, but I'm happy to hear others' views.

I will attach a patch for consideration; I think/hope I have followed the coding standards - I am watching this and PLXCOMP-117 so please feel free to ask any questions through comments on whichever is appropriate.

Hi Zuhayr,

I am running into a similar issue where I really need to support sym links as part of the assembly procedure. Do you know what version of the assembly plugin this patch is for? I would like to apply this patch and use it if possible.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Ahmed,

The version I had locally which I patched was maven-assembly-plugin:2.2.1

Hope that helps.

BTW.. there's more comment and discussion on it's possible inclusion on the PLXCOMP-117 issue. I'm more than happy to adjust/re-work these solutions so it can form part of the actual released plugin if there's sufficient interest.

Zuhayr

Hi Zuhayr,

Thanks for the response. I am trying out this patch and I am just having little trouble applying the patches. From what you have told me, I am using the following maven plugin and plexus components:

maven-assembly-plugin 2.2.1
plexus-archiver 1.1
plexus-io 1.0.1

I do get some failures applying the patch, I did not look further into it, but I will later tonight. I just want to check that I am using the right versions.

Thanks again and great work so far, any reason why this is not yet officially incorporated?

Hi Zuhayr,

I was able to get the proper revisions of the maven plugins and plexus components (as listed above), however, I am having trouble building the assembly plugin. All code patches fine, except that I run into this issue:

[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] COMPILATION ERROR :
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] /home/aelmadho/ASSEMBLY/maven/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin-2.2.1/target/generated-sources/modello/org/apache/maven/plugin/assembly/model/io/xpp3/AssemblyXpp3Writer.java:[291,119] error: unclosed string literal
[ERROR] /home/aelmadho/ASSEMBLY/maven/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin-2.2.1/target/generated-sources/modello/org/apache/maven/plugin/assembly/model/io/xpp3/AssemblyXpp3Writer.java:[292,10] error: unclosed string lite

The file in context (AssemblyXpp3Writer) looks like this at line 291-292:

if ( ( dependencySet.getOutputFileNameMapping() != null ) && !dependencySet.getOutputFileNameMapping().equals( "$

$

$

.$

" ) )

There seems to be a "\n" character at the end of the logical comparison that the parser fails. I am not very familiar with Xpp3, I need to do some more reading there, but I was hoping to try and generate maven artifacts including symlinks using the solution you have proposed.

Any idea on how I can proceed?

Thanks a bunch.

Thanks Ahmed - seems a rogue line-ending caused the issue you noted.

I now attached a fixed version of the patch. Hopefully this should solve your problem.

Zuhayr

Hi Zuhayr,

Thanks for the fix, I am now able to build and test the patch. I am not seeing the symlinks respected. I am simply using assembly to archive an artifact that contains a number of symlinks, but they are all hard links.

Do I need to specify any configuration in the descriptor to ensure that symlinks are kept?

By the way, I am using Maven 3, but I don't think that is an issue, would it be?

It sounds like you're hoping that the assembly plugin will look at symlinks on your file-system and include them within the assembled package?

This use case is what the discussion on PLXCOMP-117 covers. In summary, because of the lack of system-agnostic support for symbolic links (pre Java 7?) plexus-io doesn't read/identify symlinks in this manner.

The patch here simply allows you to configure symlinks within the assembly-definition such that they are recorded in the tar/zip file as symlinks.

If I've understood your use case correctly, to take advantage of this, you'd need to add a "symlinks" element (see my initial comment on this) to your assembly-definition that correspond to the actual symlinks on your file system.

Hope that helps.

I kind of figured that out once I looked more into the patch and this case. I am thinking of porting assembly plugin into JDK7 with ability to automatically package symlinks, would you be interested in helping out?