Ant won't preserve symlinks

[honza-kasik]

When unzip is not available on machine, Ant is used to unzip a file. This method however won't preserve symlinks and filesystem permissions which is crucial for httpd for example. Ant has to be either:

• Removed and unzip has to be listed as a dependency for noe-core
• Replaced by a method/dependency which knows how to handle symlinks

[jan-onderka]

Zip archive by design doesn't preserve file system permissions.

[honza-kasik]

@jan-onderka Thanks for pointing this out, I edited the issue. Although man page of unzip says following:

       Dates,  times  and  permissions  of stored directories are not restored
       except under Unix. (On Windows NT and successors,  timestamps  are  now
       restored.)

Because NOE core supports multiple platforms, preserving filesystem permissions is not expected feature from unzip.

[honza-kasik]

I started to stitch something together using Commons Compress which should support symlinks to see if it can become our replacement for Ant.

[m-czernek]

That would be quite interesting, especially if that means we can drop the huge Ant jar we're carrying, which accounts for something like 80% of Noe Core's artifact size.

Edit: Also, their license is compatible with ours, so it's a fit imho. The main question is, how will it behave on Windows and Solaris...

[jstefl]

Zip archive by design doesn't preserve file system permissions.

@jan-onderka This is based on what, please? I don't think that is true.

We always took advantage of 'native' unzip to unpack tested product with original access rights (on RHEL and Solaris) (for instance, executable permission was lost on scripts when and was used). On Windows, ant was used since there is no (no cygwin) unzip installed. However, windows and access rights is different story.