Hi,

> As I said in the other bug, symlinks handling in not fully specified

Yes. I've mostly submitted a bug report in case anybody else encounters the problem.

> At present I am not sure if having symlinks in a distribution makes sense

I agree.
In my case symlinks are being used to restructure a large legacy module into smaller packages. When creating sdists the symlinks are dereferenced on another developer's host (OSX) and all is well but they on my host (Linux) I get packages with broken symlinks.

> BTW the example you link to is not at all monkey-patching

My mistake. When I worked around this issue I did monkey-patch sdist. I also just wrapped the source path is os.path.readlink() before hardlinking. I think the approach in that link is a much better solution so I have referred to it instead.

-Ollie