On Nov 4, 2015, at 11:52 PM, Stephan Beal wrote: > > You've hit it right on the head: POLICY. No SCM should enforce > project-specific policies, and symlinks (for me) fall into that category.
I can argue the reverse on the same basis: Fossil shouldn’t be making a policy decision about what I put into my repository, just because it might not work on some other platform that I’m not using. You may say that I might later want to check the repo out on that other platform, but the consequences here really are not that dire. If you check a symlink into the repo, and some future Windows native symlink feature is added to Fossil, and you can’t use it because $REASON, you can fix it in trunk on a POSIX box and try again. All you’ve lost is the ability to check old versions of the code out on that platform. Yes, that means you can’t do things like bisect against old versions, but clearly if you’re using symlinks, you’ve got platforms around that will let you do the bisection. And you probably don’t have a platform-specific bug to bisect in this case, since you clearly weren’t checking the repo out on Windows back when the symlink was added. War story: I use Adobe Lightroom quite a lot. (Which is based on SQLite, by the way!) A couple of versions ago, it stopped letting me name folders with a trailing dot,[*] which is perfectly legal on OS X, but illegal on Windows. I don’t use Lightroom on Windows, but Adobe doesn’t let me use a feature of my OS because I *might* someday want to move that catalog to Windows. The result is that Lightroom now enforces an LCD policy on file names, refusing the union of the restrictions of Windows and OS X on both platforms. So, trailing dots aren’t the only annoying restriction. The inability to use colons is another, for example. I don’t want to be mollycoddled. [*] If you’re wondering why I might want to use a trailing dot on folder names, I sometimes abbreviate people’s last names, when the initial is all I need to disambiguate the name. I want to call the folder “Stephan B.”, not “Stephan B”. _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
