Re: Not going beyond symbolic links

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2008, 02:28 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0808041921530.3299@nehalem.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0808050356480.9611@pacific.mpi-cbg.de.mpi-cbg.de>

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> I vividly remember being quite pissed by Git replacing a symbolic link in 
> my working directory with a directory, and instead of updating the files 
> which were technically outside of the repository, Git populated that newly 
> created directory.

Well, that can cut both ways. For example, I vividly remember a time in the distant past when harddisks were tiny, and I didn't have insanely high-end hardware, and I was building the X server, but had to split things up over two partitions because each individual partition was too full.

IOW, sometimes you may _want_ to use symlinks that way, even within one project - with a symlink allowing you to move parts of it around "transparently".

Of course, these days under Linux we can just use bind mounts, so the use of symlinks to stitch together two or more different trees is fairly old-fashioned, but is still the only option on some systems or if you don't have root.

(These days harddisks are also generally so big that it never happens. But on my EeePC laptop, I still end up with two filesystems, 4GB and 8GB each. So it's not inconceivable to be in that kind of situation even today).

			Linus