Hello, I'm trying to upload builds of my game, but instead of butler following symlinks it uploads the actual symlinks themselves!
I'd really like to share my resources between different builds and not have many duplicates filling up my hard drive, not to mention the maintenance headache copying changes to every build.
Is there a way to tell butler not to "hard upload" symlinks?thanks!
Well, I've checked all documentation and looked at the source code.
Nope. Doesn't look possible as is, since this behavior is hard-coded into butler. :( Which is really, really, REALLLLLLLLLLLLY annoying, but isn't a dealbreaker. I thought there might be workarounds, like using butler to upload twice to the same repo but in different directories, which woudn't work. I can't think of a way. I suppose I can temporarily move game data to each build before uploading every time, which is less of a headache, but still frustrating.
Heyo,
Talking about symlinks is always confusing so let's take something sane as a reference, like the GNU tar documentation:
Normally, whentararchives a symbolic link, it writes a block to the archive naming the target of the link. In that way, thetararchive is a faithful record of the file system contents. When `--dereference' (`-h') is used with `--create' (`-c'),tararchives the files symbolic links point to, instead of the links themselves.
That's also butler's behavior. It tries to be a faithful record of the file system contents.
Having that behavior by default is really useful because "dereferencing" symlinks makes (for example) macOS builds unnecessarily large - those often have symlinks in `YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/Frameworks`. Linux builds also tend to have symlinks, although it's less standard (obviously!)
Since butler/wharf are entirely itch.io codebases, we can definitely add a `--dereference` option for your usecase - it won't be the default, but it still might make things better for you?
Hi!!
Yes, that option would be incredibly handy. I agree that it should not be the default - otherwise you'll break a lot of people's builds!
For Linux, which is where I do all my development, and will upload every platform build from to itch.io, the symlinks are super handy.
Adding that option would definitely work for me, thanks for considering my plea. :)
the bleeding-edge version of butler (butler head) now accepts a `--dereference` option to the `push` command:
butler push --dereference somedirectory user/game:channel
You can check what it sees ahead of time by using the (hidden) walk command:
butler --json walk --dereference somedirectory
To get the latest bleeding-edge butler, you can run
butler upgrade --head
Let me know how it works for you!
Hmm. I get an error with both commands. :(
Looks like the path string connector logic has failed. It's appending the symlink to the directory path. These should be separate:
The first one is the directory to upload, the second is the followed symlink.
Edit: It shouldn't even try to resolve any symlinks at all. There is no reason (in this case) to know about "q1-assets-release4comics/art", it should just be "itch.io/linux/art" where "art" was the symlinked dir. Hope this didn't create a confusing mess for you!!
