Hi Henrik, On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 22:09:01 +0100, Henrik Hjelte wrote: > At least I have not seen it mentioned at the deferred ticket > "wishlist: manage symlinks under version control". > http://bugs.darcs.net/issue820 > > The absence of symlink-support makes it impossible to migrate a lot of > repositories to darcs from other revision control systems. Adding a > script that manages symlinks (like update-symlinks.sh) script is not a > solution for that.
I sympathise with your frustration on this because I also use many symlinks in projects I want to version control and I also have a user who is reluctant to migrate an old project from no-version-control to darcs because of the lack of symlink support. In the absence of symlink support, I suggest having a look at the FAQ for some workarounds, which while far from satisfactory, may be better than nothing: http://wiki.darcs.net/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#can-darcs-handle-symlinks As Jason points out, it would be useful if you could put some more thought into how symlink support would work concretely, say on http://wiki.darcs.net/Ideas/Symlinks And as Petr says, this is not work that we can do lightly. We have to be very careful about how we do this sort of work because we are concerned not only about backward compatibility (in this case, making sure that things either work with old darcs or more likely, just fail gracefully), but also making sure that we're not stuck with a legacy of supporting ill-designed mechanisms (consider our preferences system). > Personally I think this is the weakest spot of darcs. A critical > feature. It can not be an uncommon wish to standardize on one version > controlling system only, then you need to be able to migrate from > others to darcs. So while I understand your arguments for why this is a critical feature, I stand by my deferral of the ticket above. It does not mean that we are not going to work on this; it just means that we must first build up up the resources (time, attention, hackers, goodwill) to plunge into this long term work. So please bear with us as we focus our attention elsewhere (*)! Thank-you very much for arguing that this is a critical feature. I think it may be fair to add this to a list of Darcs 3 must haves http://wiki.darcs.net/Darcs3Wishlist Max may also want to think about what goes on there. Best regards, Eric (*) My current medium-term (1 or 2 years) objective, one which I think other Darcs hackers may share, is a Darcs which is "fast enough". We certainly do not need to be the fastest revision control system on the block, nor optimise down to the last microsecond, but we must be fast enough to avoid the most common causes of frustration, and to change the popular Darcs Story (something about pie in the sky "scientists" with their impractical theories and real world "engineers" who make things work). Patch theory does not necessarily condemn us to slow revision control; we just need to take the time out to do the practical work. -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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