How to make a branch on Windows of a repository containing symlink?

[Baptiste Lepilleur]

2010/2/7 Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com>

> It looks like the two options proposed there are:
>
> 1- just skip them
> 2- make Windows symlink-like things
> 3- and I guess another is to write a plain file with the contents of the
> link
>

I would recommend a lot of caution if/when going with option 2. Options 2 is
filesystem dependent and will therefore break a lot of existing use cases.
Here are a few use cases that I can think of that would be issue for me:
- I frequently copy project tree on USB key to work on another machine. They
tend to have FAT32 filesystem.
- Project tree hosted on a network drive, but using bzr from Windows (for
multiplatform "simultaneous" compilation)
- Few tools on Windows (are likely to) handle symlink correctly (e.g. messed
up archive, project tree copy/move...). Many existing python scripts will
likely have issue with symlinks too.
- Unless I'm mistaken, this feature is not supported by Windows XP.

I would tend to (slightly) prefer option 1 (skip file) over option 3 because
it would result in clearer errors, as long as there is a way to see the list
of skipped symblinks. On the other hand option 3 may provide a more
intuitive interface to suppress/modify a symlink, but this is low priority
use case comparing to being able to work on a repo with symblink. Given that
you would likely not be able to test your changes one can only wonder if
modifying/suppressing symlinks should be supported on Windows.

It is important that such branch made on Windows, when pushed, can be
branched from by Unix user without issues (e.g. with symlink), generate
correct patches...

Baptiste.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20100208/9812ad07/attachment.htm