Re: Not going beyond symbolic links

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 5, 2008, 12:54 UTC
Message-ID: <20080805125422.GX7008@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vej54xa80.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 11:11:11PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> The thing is, the "feature" is not very well supported, even without the
> fixes from last night.  If you have a symlink "sym" that points at "dir"
> that has "file" in it, and if neither "sym" nor "dir/file" are tracked,
> you can "git add sym/file" to add it (I called it a bug).

Well, I actually used this feature less than a year ago and did not have any problem with that. Not that it is very important for me now, but I had makefiles in a separate build directory, and I used a symlink to move building to a tmpfs partion, which sped up building slightly.

Obviously, if a symlink points to a directory inside of the repository and then you use "git add sym/file", it is definitely a mistake. OTOH, let's consider the following situation:

git init mkdir newdir touch newdir/foo git add newdir/foo git commit -m 'add foo' mv newdir /tmp/ ln -s /tmp/newdir touch newdir/bar git add newdir/bar git commit -m 'add bar' git ls-files

And you can see: newdir/bar newdir/foo

Git does exactly what I want here!

Anyway, I more concern with performance impact of your patch. If it is noticeable, then it would be nice to have an option to turn this check off.

Dmitry