brz and symlinks inside branch checkout

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Aaron.

Aaron Bentley - 01.06.18, 16:17:
> Bazaar is perfectly happy with symlinks, but if you create a symlink
> to a directory, you should not "bzr add" any of the files in that
> directory. (In fact, I thought we had good check against that). 
> Bazaar should not be manipulating files outside its working tree. 
> Bazaar is supposed to be in control of the contents of the working
> tree, so whatever files Bazaar is manipulating should actually be in
> the working tree.
> 
> os.replace is not a fix for pad.lv/411068: "The operation may fail if
> src and dst are on different filesystems".  Even if it behaved more
> like shutil.move, I disagree that 411068 should be "fixed" by using
> shutil.move or the like.  If you've mounted a directory into your
> working tree, you've taken control away from Bazaar because it can't
> reproduce that state.

Do you want to tell me that my use case is nothing Bazaar is usable for?

Why is Bazaar in need to control the working tree? It *never* controls 
it. It never is the only software access to a working tree is restricted 
to. I do a rm -r some-directory-inside-the-working-tree or something 
else does it and the stuff is gone. To me that is quite similar to the 
rare case that the Private directory would not be there. It is mounted 
on login by pam-ecryptfs. So it is usually just always there when I use 
brz. And if it is not there… hey thats my responsibility to be careful 
in that case.

I genuinely believe that software should be behave as intelligent as 
required, but not more intelligent like in "I do know better what to use 
me for than you do.". However if there is a solid reason why brz cannot 
work in such a use case or it would be too cumbersone and error prone to 
add such functionality, then I´d be willing to reconsider my use case. 
But an artificially limitation IMHO is not it. Of course it is not on me 
to require that anyone implements it for me. So unless someone does or I 
provide a patch I am stuck with the current situation anyway. I could 
probably do some kind of union / overlay thing to make brz believe that 
it is working on just one filesystem, while it is not.

[…]
-- 
Martin