Question: Symbolic links

[jarethholt]

• Cookiecutter version: 1.6.0
• Template project url: None
• Python version: 3.6.7
• Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

Description:

I would like to use cookiecutter for managing experiments/simulations for a climate model, EC-Earth. Each experiment has a set of input and configuration files, so cookiecutter seems like a good option for initializing an experiment directory with generic (or empty) versions of all the files I know I have to fill in. However, a lot of these data files are the same for each experiment and can be quite large, so I would like to use symbolic links for those.

I have these files symbolically linked in my directory and ran cookiecutter, which successfully generated a new directory with the files I wanted. However, all of the symbolically-linked files have become copies; they have the same size and content as the originals (based on cmp) but not the same inode, so they aren't even hard links. I added these directories to "_copy_without_render" in the cookiecutter.json file, and didn't see a change.

Is there a way to preserve symbolic links using cookiecutter? Would this have to be done with a pre/post-generate hook? Would I have to remove these files from my cookiecutter directory then, or is there a way to suppress copying these files (so that I can keep track of which files need to be linked and where)?

[insspb]

At this moment cookiecutter makes copies.
This issue goes as an enhancement to 2.0.0 release, with key "Respect links"
But I am not sure that this will be implemented.