[Gambas-user] include/exclude lists for executables, source archives and (autotools) packages

[Bruce]

Some comments and questions and requests.

1) the gambasdoc "Project Directory Structure" page
( http://gambasdoc.org/help/doc/project_structure?v3 ) says that 
a) "Other files and directories" i.e. the Data folder are not included
in the executable. Surely this cannot be right?
b) "[.hidden] stuff are not included in the executables.  Inadvertently,
a few weeks ago I created a symbolic link in the Data folder of a
utility project to a file in the hidden folder. This project is (so far)
only on my PC. What I am wondering is did the archiver include the
symbolic link or did it snap it?

2) On the packaging tab of the Preferences popup, there is that list of
files that are ignored when creating source archives. I have never
really paid too much attention to it but now I am wondering what the
entries in this list mean. We have a long list of "documentation" and
modelling files in .hidden that are very often temporary in nature and
can be very large. Is there a way to exclude entire directories from the
archives?
For example, we have a Modellio workspace in .hidden/Design/ that could
and usually does contain a bunch of subdirs of metadata built by the
Modellio tool with stuff in them that does not need to be archived as it
is rebuilt everytime the Modellio tool is loaded. I would like to
exclude these specific paths from archives (they are dozens of Mbytes)

Another example is our code generators leave a lot of "temporary"
metadata files and sqlite files here and there in .hidden. These are
useful to keep in the live copy as we frequently dive in and out of the
tools. But when the project is archived these files are all generally
rendered useless.  Again I'd just like to exclude these files from the
archives.

Why do I want to keep all this stuff inside the project?  Even with a
team of three and two "major" products to support, we created a
documentation nightmare. The projects are on a shared network drive, the
documentation and models were wherever and there were multiple copies
and variants of everything.  It has taken us almost two months to clean
up the horse auctions docos and move it all into the gambas project
directories. This is a "good" thing. But at the moment we are creating
source archives that are approaching the limits of a DVD and need to
slim them down. We are docing this manually at the moment and that is
NOT a good thing.

If there is not a way to exclude specific paths then fine, we will have
to come up with an answer here.

3) Packages and I am only talking about autotool packing here again.
I thought somewhere there was a way to exclude and include specific
directories in the package archives.  By "somewhere" I mean that I am
not sure whether it was in Gambas or in something I wrote myself back in
the Gambas2 days or even somewhere else, so this is really a "please
help if you can" request. Given the above, there is a lot of stuff we
are now keeping in the .hidden directory that should or should not go in
the package. Can you think of a way I could achieve this?

Paddys-Hill is (hopefully) going to expand shortly with, for us, a very
large project. It is a bespoke development but the customer seems quite
happy to have it released under GPL (as long as they get what they
want). I am currently in a bit of a panic as I haven't had to cope with
a team of 15'ish for some years, hence these and no doubt other weird
questions that will arise shortly.

Thanks in advance for any input you can provide.

best regards
Bruce