Re: [PATCH] Introduce core.keepHardLinks

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 13, 2008, 16:09 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0810131611470.22125@pacific.mpi-cbg.de.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vskr0bnlk.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> >> I cannot fathom why a user wants this much rope to hang themselves 
> >> with...
> >
> > The question is not so much why anyone want to do this, but _if_.
> 
> Sorry, I think the question should be _why_.
> 
> You can gain a sympathetic "Ah, that is sensible, and 'this much rope to 
> hang themselves with' comment was unwarranted" only by answering that 
> question.

Okay, here are a couple of reasons:

- all the editors that this guy tested keep the hard links, so it was 
  kinda hard to understand why Git insists on behaving differently,

- if the user asked for hard links, it is not Git's place to question that 
  decision,

- and in that user's scenario a certain file has to be shared between 
  different projects that are all version-controlled with Git, but in 
  different teams and with different servers they connect to.  So no, you 
  cannot even make a submodule of it, because the guys involved do not 
  share any repository/server access.  Besides, submodules are not 
  user-friendly enough yet.

Oh, and come to think of it, this could solve the old issue of "I want to track only a few files in my $HOME/".

Anyway, I think that breaking hard links is not a nice habit of Git (after all, from the user's point of view the file is not created, but modified!), and I would have expected others to need a lot less arguments to see it that way, too.

Ciao, Dscho