Re: Uninitialized submodules as symlinks

From: Heiko Voigt <hvoigt@hvoigt.net>
Date: Oct 17, 2016, 09:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20161017092838.GC43997@book.hvoigt.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqr37izxkf.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 09:48:16AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 06:10:17PM +0200, Heiko Voigt wrote:
> >> On Fri, Oct 07, 2016 at 06:17:05PM +0000, David Turner wrote:
> >> > Presently, uninitialized submodules are materialized in the working
> >> > tree as empty directories.  We would like to consider having them be
> >> > symlinks.  Specifically, we'd like them to be symlinks into a FUSE
> >> > filesystem which retrieves files on demand.
> >> 
> >> How about portability? This feature would only work on Unix like
> >> operating systems. You have to be careful to not break Windows since
> >> they do not have symlinks.
> >
> > NTFS does have symlinks, but you need admin right to create them though
> > (unless you change the policy).
> 
> That sounds like saying "It has, but it practically is not usable by
> Git as a mechanism to achieve this goal" to me.

Yes and that is why Git for Windows does not use them and I simplified to: "Windows does not have symlinks". For a normal user there is no such thing as symlinks on Windows, unfortunately.

Cheers Heiko