gitosis and symlink requirement

From: Ringo De Smet <ringo.desmet@gmail.com>
Date: May 5, 2009, 12:50 UTC
Message-ID: <C4130655-CC74-498B-AF99-045F79D367B9@gmail.com>

Hello Tommi,

I just tried to setup gitosis on a VirtualBox virtual machine with guest OS Ubuntu 8.10 Intredid Server (amd64). However, the installation fails with the following stacktrace:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/git/repositories/gitosis- 
admin.git/
Reinitialized existing Git repository in /home/git/repositories/ 
gitosis-admin.git/
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/bin/gitosis-init", line 8, in <module>
     load_entry_point('gitosis==0.2', 'console_scripts', 'gitosis- 
init')()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gitosis-0.2-py2.5.egg/ 
gitosis/app.py", line 24, in run
     return app.main()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gitosis-0.2-py2.5.egg/ 
gitosis/app.py", line 38, in main
     self.handle_args(parser, cfg, options, args)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gitosis-0.2-py2.5.egg/ 
gitosis/init.py", line 142, in handle_args
     symlink_config(git_dir=admin_repository)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gitosis-0.2-py2.5.egg/ 
gitosis/init.py", line 64, in symlink_config
     tmp,
OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted

I found the rootcause: I run /home/git on a VirtualBox Shared Folder. I use this setup since all my Shared Folders of the host OS are in a backup plan. The git home folder is mounted using the vboxsf file system type, which does not support symbolic links:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/818

Is there a possibility of updating gitosis so the symlinking is not needed?

Ringo De Smet