Re: Symbolic link documentation

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Sep 20, 2007, 18:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20070920181100.GV3099@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <70952A932255A2489522275A628B97C3052E993B@xmb-sjc-233.amer.cisco.com>

"Matt Seitz (matseitz)" <matseitz@cisco.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> The git-update-index and git-update-ref manual references are the
> closest to what I was looking for.  Both are more low-level and
> technical than what I was hoping for, and the discussion in
> git-update-index seems targeted primarily at how symlinks are translated
> on file systems that don't support symlinks.
> 
> I guess I was looking for something like the GNU "tar" documentation of
> how symlinks are handled
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/dereference.html#deref
> erence).

Git never dereferences a symlink that are stored as part of the revision data. The only time we dereference a symlink is when it is used inside of .git/refs, or as .git/HEAD, which is what the git-update-ref manpage was talking about.

So Git handles symlinks in the working tree *without* dereferencing them. Internally we store the target of the symlink, much as tar would store the target of the symlink. There is no way to activate a dereference behavior (--dereference / -h in GNU tar) as typically you want to preseve the symlink as a symlink to the target; its part of your source code.

Maybe this is a good hint that the user manual should have a section on symbolic links. Its obvious to old Git hands that a symlink is nothing more than a file with a slightly different mode, but that may not be obvious to people who are new to Git.

-- 
Shawn.