My goal is to compile VTK, then archive it in a zip or tar.gz to reuse it in different places.
However, I loose the symlinks while extracting the archive…
Is there a way to prevent the symlink creation in the first place?
The one symlink might be able to be dropped, but the SONAME and the link name (plain .so) both need to exist in typical ELF usage patterns (the SOVERSION name is also typical). There are flags to tar (and probably zip too) to not dereference symlinks. Maybe those would be better in this situation?
All I can suggest is better documentation and instruction. I’d really rather not add hacks/hidden options to VTK’s build for such things which are not broken on VTK’s side, sorry. Somebody will find them and think they can use it not understanding what the use case for such things is and then I get another issue filed about it.