Re: [PATCH 3/3] difftool: Disable --symlinks on cygwin

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 26, 2012, 17:39 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJDDKr4z_ddwe7s8dY80dZJMNP=75VK6NjOV0WCqFL_LDuMpBA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPQNSZ=yWxVivadJfh9BMPtqiiGyyEL0vZu+fvsu_Zzhd7yhw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 4:31 AM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 5:14 AM, David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Symlinks are not ubiquitous on Windows so make --no-symlinks the default.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
>> ---
>> I don't have cygwin so I can't verify this one myself.
>> Is 'cygwin' really the value of $^O there?
>>
>>  git-difftool.perl | 3 ++-
>>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/git-difftool.perl b/git-difftool.perl
>> index 591ee75..10d3d97 100755
>> --- a/git-difftool.perl
>> +++ b/git-difftool.perl
>> @@ -291,7 +291,8 @@ sub main
>>                 gui => undef,
>>                 help => undef,
>>                 prompt => undef,
>> -               symlinks => $^O ne 'MSWin32' && $^O ne 'msys',
>> +               symlinks => $^O ne 'cygwin' &&
>> +                               $^O ne 'MSWin32' && $^O ne 'msys',
>
> I thought Cygwin supported (their own version of) symlinks? What's the
> rationale for not using it by default there?

I am not a Cygwin user so I cannot verify whether it is a good or bad idea.

I have a few questions regarding symlinks on Cygwin:

Do the symlinks work consistently with the Perl symlink() function? Can we always rely on this capability being available? Do all win32 filesystems support it? Do all builds of cygwin perl support it?

If any of these answers are "no" or "maybe", then an improvement beyond this patch would be to perhaps support a `difftool.symlinks` configuration variable so that the user can tell us what to use as the default.

-- 
David