Re: Implement core.symlinks to support filesystems without symlinks

From: Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>
Date: Feb 27, 2007, 23:13 UTC
Message-ID: <200702280013.45598.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>
In-Reply-To: <11726125012895-git-send-email-johannes.sixt@telecom.at>

tisdag 27 februari 2007 22:41 skrev Johannes Sixt:

> 
> Here is a small patch series that adds a configuration variable

core.symlinks.

Show 8 quoted lines

> From the manual:
> 
> core.symlinks::
> 	If false, symbolic links are checked out as small plain files that
> 	contain the link text. gitlink:git-update-index[1] and
> 	gitlink:git-add[1] will not change the recorded type to regular
> 	file. Useful on filesystems like FAT that do not support
> 	symbolic links. True by default.

How useful is that? The problem is that those links won't work so the checkout will be broken. Creating copies would be less broken since the "links" could still be used. It should be possible to use the index to see which file is an original and which is a symblink, provided both are in the same repository. Then maybe fall back to this approach if the symlink target cannot be resolved.

I'm not sure how people use symbolic links in git, but I'd imagine they typically point to a file in the same repository.

-- robin