Re: Windows symlinks

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2008, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130806241618p69f6167dycb09cdec1af8ba0@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <911589C97062424796D53B625CEC0025E4618F@USCOBRMFA-SE-70.northamerica.cexp.com>

On 6/24/08, Patrick.Higgins@cexp.com <Patrick.Higgins@cexp.com> wrote:

>  Cygwin's clever symlink trick seems to work pretty well in practice. I'm not exactly sure what
> it's doing, but it seems to create a shortcut that it's own programs understand. Some other
> non-Cygwin programs seem to understand them, too, but Java does not which is a big
> problem for me.

It seems somewhat odd that your developers are relying on an operating system feature that doesn't even exist. I might suggest one of:

- add an abstraction layer to your Java applet that understands
cygwin-style symlinks

- actually just check in the file multiple times; git will store it
efficiently anyway

- improve your Makefile to automatically copy the files and/or create
symlinks at build time rather than storing the symlinks in revision
control.

My understanding of Clearcase is that it actually loads a virtual filesystem driver in Windows and does all kinds of insane magic - slowly and inefficiently, too - behind the scenes. Something tells me git (and every other VCS :)) really doesn't want to go there.

Have fun,

Avery