I'm compiling standalone Spidermonkey, and find that lots of files are installed as symbolic links instead of copied as actual files. Such behavior brings problems to Linux distribution packagers, as the source tree are deleted after building. Here are my steps: mkdir -p mozjs-build && pushd mozjs-build ../mozilla-central/js/src/configure --with-system-icu --prefix=$HOME/spidermonkey-trunk make make install There are lots of symbolic links in $PREFIX, for example: $ ll include/mozjs-51a1/jsapi.h lrwxrwxrwx 1 yen yen 49 Aug 18 21:37 include/mozjs-51a1/jsapi.h -> /home/yen/Projects/mozilla-central/js/src/jsapi.h These files should be installed as actual files (copied). Fedora manually install all symbolic links as actual files: [1] # Install files, not symlinks to build directory pushd %{buildroot}%{_includedir} for link in `find . -type l`; do header=`readlink $link` rm -f $link cp -p $header $link done popd My package on AUR, the Arch Linux's unofficial repository, patches the build system to force all symlinks to be copied. [2] Please consider a change. [1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/mozjs45.git/tree/mozjs45.spec [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/install-copy-files.patch?h=js45

Found an old report. This is indeed a problem since long time ago.