On Jan 28, 2011, at 12:43 PM, Stephan Beal wrote: > i, for one, am against adding symlinks support for exactly these types of > reasons. Too many questions regarding their portable use cannot be answered > (and some of them are purely philosophical rather than technical, e.g. > whether or not to allow links outside the repo).
But this is not a problem. Symlinks are symlinks: they can point to whatever they like, even if path doesn't exist, even on Windows (Vista/7). This is one of the reasons they're called "symbolic", I guess :-) We should't even care if they point outside the repo or inside. The actual technical problem is a Windows implementation detail: function CreateSymbolicLink() must be explicitly told if we'd like a link to a file, or a link to a folder. > i've been a die-hard Unix user since well over 10 years, i don't own a copy > of Windows or Mac or any other non-Unix-like system (don't tell me Mac is > Unix-like!), It's not Unix-like, it's Unix :-) http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm > and i use symlinks on a daily basis. Even so, i strongly feel that trying to > version control symlinks is an exercise in futility, pain, and suffering, and > a great source of bugs and incompatibilities. It cannot work transparently > across platforms, period, and there are good reasons why so few source > control systems attempt to version them. Symlinks are platform-specific > convenience objects, and not a feature which can be portably emulated. But we still _must_ handle them somehow. The current (pre-symlink) behavior depends on a "good" state of working directory -- that you won't use symlinks in an incompatible way. And you can discover the incompatible behavior only after adding files to repository. See this discussion: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.fossil-scm.user/996/focus=1020 and this ticket: http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/tktview/aa494b5832ac1a1ee098d96278f08c0cb7e112b9 My proposal fixes this by handling symlinks as symlinks. I think making symlinks plain-text files on platforms that don't support them is better than having a broken repository on platforms that support them. -- Dmitry Chestnykh _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
