grunt exec:<theme>

[slackerzz]

according to Compile LESS with Grunt docs

grunt exec:<theme>

Republishes symlinks to the source files to the pub/static/frontend/<Vendor>/<theme>/<locale> directory.

If your less file contains an @import statement it will copied to pub/static/frontend/<Vendor>/<theme>/<locale> instead of being symlinked

[tkacheva]

@slackerzz thanks for reporting. What is your Magento version?

[tkacheva]

Internal issue MAGETWO-59579

[slackerzz]

I'm running 2.1.1

[eug123]

Hi @slackerzz,
Files are published as copies in case they were preprocessed somehow, please compare your original less source and its' published copy.

[slackerzz]

I've compared the two files and they are different, under app/code/design/frontend/<Vendor>/<theme>/css/source my less files contains some:

@import "dir/_mypartial"

while in pub/static/frontend/<Vendor>/<theme>/<locale> these imports became:

@import "dir/_mypartial.less"

but why? It doesn't make sense http://lesscss.org/features/#import-directives-feature

[eug123]

@slackerzz yes you are right, you can import files without extension.
But currently magento processes @import directives so to find respective file and rebuilds @import using actually found file path with extension.
So to have symlinks you need to include .less extension to the path and use single quotes
(i.e. @import 'dir/_mypartial.less';).
Thanks

[slackerzz]

Maybe It would be nice to include such information in the docs. I thought I was using standard LESS, instead we have a customized version. Each day I discover a different behavior from the standard LESS language, like #4218 or #2264

[veloraven]

I'm closing this issue as it was fixed in develop branch.