On Jun 3, 2016 10:11 AM, "jungle Boogie" wrote:
>
> On 31 May 2016 at 01:58, Scott Robison wrote:
> > Just an announcement in case anyone is using the winsymlink branch
(which
> > seems unlikely to me).
> >
> > I've merged the current trunk into winsymlink. The only functionality
> > exposed in the winsymlink branch, other than what's in trunk, is Windows
> > symbolic links.
> >
>
> Will this be merged into trunk eventually?
That decision is above my pay grade. :) Mapping symlinks to Windows is
Pretty Good, but it's got a few shortcomings:
1. Windows symlinks are only available in Vista & later. It could be a
"surprise" to anyone using Fossil on anything older that Vista. Of course,
the current approach of just writing the link out as a text file with the
link target could be considered unsatisfying as well. The winsymlink branch
deals with this by keeping the current functionality for people who can't
use Windows symlinks for whatever reason (namely writing the link out as a
single line text file).
2. Windows symlinks are not "target agnostic" like posix symlinks are.
Windows symlinks have to know whether they're pointing at a file or a
directory, and should that change, the symlink needs to change. I've
implemented functionality so that "fossil revert" will change the symlink
type should the symlink type change, but it's not obvious to me how to
handle this properly.
3. Not very many people have used the winsymlink branch so it's hard to say
just how robust it really is. In fact, I just discovered an issue that
needs to be addressed related to directory symlinks. There is a bit of a
chicken and egg problem here, in that not a lot of the windows user base is
going to try the functionality until it makes it to trunk, but we don't
want untested / unreliable code in trunk.
4. There is the whole Windows stupidity of not allowing symlink
manipulation in an unelevated command prompt for administrator accounts. It
works if you elevate the command prompt. It works if you don't have
administrator access. It's not a reason in my mind to avoid the winsymlink
functionality, but it certainly makes a person's life more difficult in
Windows.
5. Maybe winsymlink is a solution in search of a problem. I picked it as
something to contribute to Fossil not because I especially needed it, but
because it was a way for me to contribute something that might be useful to
someone and would give fossil feature parity between posix and win32 vs
simply ignoring symlinks on Windows.
I'd love to see it merged to trunk some day, but I'm not comfortable
unilaterally making that decision, nor am I comfortable advising that it is
ready to merge to trunk yet. Given that your question is the first time
this has been asked in months, if not years, demonstrates it isn't a
clamored for feature.
Have you tried it? Have you had problems with it? What is your use case for
symbolic links?
SDR
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