Re: [PATCH] Disable USE_SYMLINK_HEAD by default

From: Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2005, 17:06 UTC
Message-ID: <1132074375.25640.47.camel@dv>
In-Reply-To: <20051115121854.GV30496@pasky.or.cz>

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 13:18 +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:

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> Dear diary, on Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 12:09:42PM CET, I got a letter
> where Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> said that...
> > I think Junio is right: we should not force everybody not to use symlinks, 
> > only because there happens to be VFAT-, SMB- or HTTP-shared repositories. 
> > As Junio says, if there are people experiencing problems because they lack 
> > symbolic links, they should fix it.
> 
> I'm ambivalent here. I would like to have just a single behaviour here,
> since the symbolic ref otherwise really does not get much testing. But I
> can also understand that we are breaking tools here.
> 
> Still, for the reason above, I think we should aim at the symbolic refs
> being the canonical format in the next major release after 1.0, giving
> users time to fix their tools. I can see no advantage in symlinks except
> the backwards compatibility - speed argument was presented, but I don't
> buy that until I see hard data supporting that.

I planned to write about symrefs long ago, and probably I waited for too long. I still hope it will be the default for 1.0 release, but if not, I hope the next release won't be too far away.

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> > On the other hand, I think it would be useful to be able to configure the 
> > behaviour via .git/config.
> 
> Yes, I would very much like to have this. I still want to go
> symrefs-only for public repositories created for cg-admin-setuprepo, so
> that fetching over HTTP works properly.

Agreed. By the way, the symref doesn't need to be called HEAD - it could be "trunk" or "main" or "default-branch".

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin