On 3 November 2015 at 10:48, Eric Rubin-Smith <eas....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 1:33 AM, Stephan Beal <sgb...@googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> i can't speak for Richard, but if i had my way, fossil wouldn't support
>> symlinks at all.
>>
>
This would force me to stop using Fossil (or at least updating to a version
that didn't support them), and to recommend to everyone (including the
hundreds of students who I've introduced to Fossil) to be wary using it.
Part of the problem in this discussion is that everyone seems to be
assuming that Fossil is only used for source trees and makefiles. I
maintain a dozen web sites, a few of them are my course-based ones. I have
(simplified for expository purposes) let's say 3 repos: Courses, cps710 and
cps506. Courses has sub-directories Themes (for CSS, etc.) and JScript.
cps710 and cps506 are nested under Courses, so the structure looks like:
Courses
Themes
JScript
cps710
Themes -> ../Themes
JScript -> ../JScript
f2013
index.html
f2013 -> .
current -> ../current
Themes -> ../Themes
JScript -> ../JScript
f2015
index.html
f2015 -> .
current -> ../current
Themes -> ../Themes
JScript -> ../JScript
current -> f2015
index.html -> current/index.html
cps506
Themes -> ../Themes
JScript -> ../JScript
index.html -> current/index.html
....etc.
So symlinks, with nested repos is a huge win for me. Fortunately, I only
need to set up a new course occasionally, so I only have to fight with
Fossil about symlinks occasionally, but too often!
The poor support for symlinks is far and away my biggest complaint with
Fossil. (The limited support for file permissions is second, because I
often want to put things in the repo that I'm not ready to show the
students yet.)
It's simple: a symlink is a filesystem artifact and should be reflected as
such in the repository. It should not be followed; if foo is a symlink and
I say "fs add foo/bar" it should probably give an error. (This might
surprise people the first time, but it's easy to explain - foo/bar isn't
part of the repo, regardless of where foo points.)
> :-) Fossil creates a problem by not supporting symlinks properly, and you
> use the volume of complaints about the problem to support your claim that
> the problem was inevitable.
>
> Not implementing them at all, or implementing them poorly as Fossil has,
> is what maximizes complaints -- hence the large amount of emails.
>
Exactly. Please fix symlinks so that if you live only on Unix you get
seamless support. If you work back and forth between Windows and Unix then
you probably just don't use symlinks, so it won't be a problem for you!
../Dave
_______________________________________________
fossil-users mailing list
fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org
http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
