[rfc] Windows symlink support

[John Arbash Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Hi John,

...

> ~From your other message:
> | In the backup use case one's tool should be able to accept
> | and regurgitate arbitrary directory trees.  This should
> | include every idiosyncrasy of the host file system: time
> | stamps, permissions, acls, extended attributes, arbitrary
> | hard links, wild file names, etc.
> |
> | But if you want to support distribute software development
> | with trees and repositories hosted on an uncontrolled set
> | of file systems (including networked systems) then I claim
> | a "good" tool should foster practices that will trigger as
> | few unpleasant surprises as possible.
> 
> I agree that we should stay focused on creating a tool to support
> distributed software development.  If that happens to also be a good
> tool for backups, all the better.

I would like to add a small point here. One very useful use case for
versioning /etc is not for backups, but actually for system
administration over multiple machines.

Say you version /etc/hosts.allow, they you can push around that change
so that all the machines now have a new entry in hosts.allow.

Or you modify the configuration for httpd, and you have multiple
machines running for distributed workload.

Some people version $HOME, which I have started playing around with.
Mostly because I have 10 different machines I work on, at various sites
(home, work, laptop, school, etc), where doing an NFS mounted home
directory is not possible (kind of hard to do on an airplane), but it
also sucks to try and keep my ~/.vimrc .vim/* in sync.

Anyway, there is a definite use case which isn't really a backup system,
and you would still want to version /etc or $HOME.

John
=:->
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