symlinks in subversion

[Val Schmidt <vs...@ldeo.columbia.edu>]

WRT the FAQ:
-----------snip------------
Does Subversion support symlinks?
Subversion does not currently support symlinks, and there are no 
concrete plans to support them. The obstacle has been that symbolic 
links are not portable across all the platforms Subversion runs on. 
Therefore, any design for symlink support has to account for how the 
symlinks will behave in a working copy checked out into an environment 
that doesn't support symlinks.
--------------snip-----------

It's not clear to me from this statement if the difficulty in symlinks 
is on both the client side software AND the server side, or just the 
client.

The last statement in the FAQ entry above leads me to believe the 
difficulty is in the client side application only, namely "How to you 
create symlinks in an environment that doesn't support them?".

If this is indeed the case, why not simply create support for symlinks 
in the server, but provide a provision in the client side app to fail 
gracefully when operating on a system that doesn't support symlinks 
when a module is checked out that has them. In this way symlinks would 
be supported for all of us who use operating systems that DO support 
them, rather than not supporting them at all.

In the event that the server-side subversion software also cannot 
support symlinks, one could imagine a process that scans a module 
before making a commit and removes all the symlinks, logging their 
source and target to a .symlink file hidden within the archive module. 
Then on checkout, the client would look for the .symlink file and if 
symlinks were supported on the system, recreate them, removing .symlink 
when the action was complete.

A quick google for symlink support in versioning systems shows that 
there's a load of interest in this feature. People want to be able to 
use version control as a system administration tool among other things. 
I hope you'll reconsider your decision never to support symlinks.

Thanks for listening,

Val

------------------------------------------------------------------
Val Schmidt
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
61 Route 9W
Palisades, NY 10964
m: 614 286 3726
vschmidt[at]ldeo.columbia.edu

Re: symlinks in subversion

[Mark Phippard <Ma...@softlanding.com>]

Val Schmidt <vs...@ldeo.columbia.edu> wrote on 08/18/2004 03:00:08 PM:

> WRT the FAQ:
> -----------snip------------
> Does Subversion support symlinks?
> Subversion does not currently support symlinks, and there are no 
> concrete plans to support them. The obstacle has been that symbolic 
> links are not portable across all the platforms Subversion runs on. 
> Therefore, any design for symlink support has to account for how the 
> symlinks will behave in a working copy checked out into an environment 
> that doesn't support symlinks.
> --------------snip-----------
> 
> It's not clear to me from this statement if the difficulty in symlinks 
> is on both the client side software AND the server side, or just the 
> client.
> 

Feature has been added in Subversion 1.1 (not released yet).

http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.1_releasenotes.html

Mark


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