Symlinks gets removed from input archive

[esamattis]

I tried to build Node.js, but it failed with import errors when running configure.

I'm Using following configuration:

[nodejs]
recipe = hexagonit.recipe.cmmi
url = http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.2.1.tar.gz

It seems to fail because all the dependencies for scons are are not there. Some of the dependencies are symlinked in the node.js package, but there are no symlinks in the extracted nodejs__compile__directory at all!

Compiling succeeds if I manually extract the node-v0.2.1.tar.gz -archive and use it with path-option in the cmmi-part of the buildout.

[esamattis]

I looked bit more into this. It seems that this is an issue with setuptools.

setuptools.archive_util.unpack_archive used in hexagonit.recipe.download seem to drop symlinks for some reason:

http://github.com/hexagonit/hexagonit.recipe.download/blob/master/hexagonit/recipe/download/__init__.py#L94

Here's some discussion about it:
http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue89

How about manually extracting the archive without setuptools? I could make a patch for it you see it as reasonable solution.

[hexagonit]

Thanks for looking into this, I wasn't aware of this limitation in archive_util. If you make a patch I'd be happy to review it. I have no special interest in the particular implementation of archive_util. However, I would prefer an approach that used stdlib modules to perform the unpacking instead of relying on any system binaries.

-- Kai