I have several C++ projects, that all depend on Boost – which we build locally on the same Jenkins.

The depending projects are configured to copy artifacts from the last successful build of Boost, which works. But the number of files installed by Boost (libraries and headers) is over 14K, which takes  multiple minutes to copy over even on the same server. For example, note the four minutes it took in the most recent case – artifact copying is the next step after untarring in this build:

...
19:08:14 Untarring QuantLib-1.16.tar.gz to ...
19:08:19 Untar completed.
19:12:10 Copied 14,120 artifacts from "Boost » Compile" build number 35
...

I'd like to propose an option to, instead of copying them, symlink to the chosen build's artifacts from the workspace, if possible (if the build was on the same agent). This would save both time and space in many cases.

(Note, that symbolic links are available on Windows too nowadays.)