bfd/docs building on Cygwin

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jan,

> The problem is with "cp -p" trying to preserve ownership:
> With the sources living on a Samba share I observe this
> failing with "Permission denied". Looking at the purpose of
> the copying I wonder why copies are being made in the first
> place. 

I think that the copy is there so that move-if-change invocation
on the next line of the rule will work.  I think that script
requires both files to be present...


> Would the change below 

> -	test -e aoutx.texi || test ! -f $(srcdir)/aoutx.texi || cp -p $(srcdir)/aoutx.texi .
> +	test -e aoutx.texi || test ! -f $(srcdir)/aoutx.texi || $(LN_S) $(srcdir)/aoutx.texi .

I think that this will fail if the source and build directories
are on different file systems.


> (Seeing the not insignificant amou of redundancy here:
> Isn't the binutils build system implying GNU make anyway,
> for vpath support? If so, is there a reason all these
> individual rules couldn't be consolidated into a few
> pattern rules?)

None that I can think of.  I would certainly be happy to
review such a patch.  It would be especially good if the
patch replaced "cp -p" with something like "$(COPY)" which
could then be set to "cp -p" for most hosts but something
else for situations like yours...

Cheers
   Nick