Re: [PATCH] cg-pull to stop treating "master" specially, fix fetch_local for .git/HEAD

From: Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>
Date: Nov 10, 2005, 20:11 UTC
Message-ID: <1131653507.11283.31.camel@dv>
In-Reply-To: <20051110192430.GS30496@pasky.or.cz>

Hi, Petr!

On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 20:24 +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>   can you still remember why did you introduce this? In GNU cp
> documentation, I can see just
> 
>        -b, --backup
>               Make backups of files that are about to be overwritten or removed.
> 
> which doesn't make sense to me - -L dereferences symlinks.

You are right, it must be my error. Anyway, it was so long ago that I would need to review and retest it.

While at that, let's stop using symlinks. git doesn't use symlinks on Cygwin. I think git should use that code on all OSes, since the benefits of using symlinks are minimal (I think the only benefits are their atomicity and resolving the reference in the kernel rather than in userspace). Having more uniform code for all platforms would simplify development and testing. It could also reduce requirements for the transport protocols. Finally, symlinks could be still used by the users (if they know what they are doing) - git and cogito would simply become symlink agnostic.

When files are copied around, symlinks are pain to deal with. They require special handling to be preserved both for remote operation and dereferenced for local operation (that's what my patch was intended to do). I'm not even considering what would happen when cloning from Linux to Windows or vice versa.

Sure, it can wait until git 1.0, but it would be great to keep this goal in mind.

Disclaimer - I'm not reading the git mailing list, so if it was discussed, I'm sorry, I don't intend to restart that discussion - just give me the pointer and I'll read it.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin