I'm in the middle of something else atm so I'm not going to commit these changes... But I do have some comments from glancing over it.
On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 8:32 PM, Eric S. Raymond <e...@thyrsus.com> wrote: > +3. Are there other prefixes besides "link " used in the blob content > +of special files? If so, what are they and what are their semantics? None at this time. > +=== Representation of symbolic links === > + > +When the Subversion dumper creates a content blob representing a > +symbolic link (that is, with the svn:special property) the contents of > +the blob is not just the link's target path. It will have the prefix > +"link ". The loader removes this prefix. > + > +FIXME: Why is this? Was it part of a plan to tag other special > +file types with different prefixes? It's not accurate to say that the loader removes the prefix. Symbolic links are only handled client side. The repository just sees a link as a normal file. The client looks for svn:special property and then uses the contents of the file to construct the link. For instance Windows has no support for symlinks (it has things like it but us supporting that is complicated due to details of Windows that aren't important here) so checking out something with a symlink in it just results in the file existing in the wc. You can see an artifact of this by doing `svn cat link` where link is the name of some file that's a link. You'll get back the "link target" output just like you see in the dump. We've got some ideas on how to use it for implementing something along the lines of views. But we haven't spent much time on fully implementing it yet.
