Launchpad svn/git imports failure causes

[Martin (gzlist)]

Thanks for that background Russel.

On 10/09/2010, Russel Winder <russel at russel.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Anyway, the fact that there is an issue is now a topic in the right
> audience.  Do we have any idea what the actual problem is that Anatoly
> is seeing with Sikuli?  Is it simply that the committers have assumed
> symlink capability which Windows fails to have?  Is there a lesson here
> for Bazaar?  Can Mercurial really get round these issues or is Anatoly's
> suggestion just a "peeved hack" that may not solve the problem?

Well, in a sense that original bug was filed in the right place, the
guy wanted to branch that project and couldn't. There was also a
pretty easy fix, "stop versioning symlinks". There aren't many things
you need them in your repo for and it tends to be better to create
them as part of the build process etc. But this isn't a message that
really helps, if it works on the maintainer's box and doesn't on yours
it's mostly your problem.

So, while this is hard to fix for the general case in Bazaar, and easy
to fix for the small specific cases in projects using bzr, it's
basically our problem.

I suspect but don't know that projects that actually are cross
platform but have symlinks in the tree either:
* Have a separate build system for windows that doesn't touch them at all
* Don't really care that they aren't regular file copies
So something Wrong like just omitting or duplicating files generally
"works" and is I guess what hg does (unless it really requires Vista
or later and you to run as an admin). Bazaar should perhaps also
implement some hack like this rather than waiting for The Right Thing.

Martin