Re: Intro and questions

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Greg Hudson wrote:

> > Ouch. What is the expected way on systems that don't support
> > symlinks?
>
> Our best bet is probably to just not to check out symlinks on Windows.

>From the Perforce 99.2 manual:

        "UNIX clients access these as symbolic links; non-UNIX clients
        treat them as (small) text files."

It's also worth noting that Windows 2000 has something called "junctions"
that are eh, sorta-like symlinks (I haven't probed them deeply enough to
know the extent of their similarity to or difference from symlinks, but I
know they're not hardlinks, which I *think* are still supported in 2k).
(heh, junctions: <http://advogato.org/person/tripp/diary.html?start=1>)

I can't recall how Cygwin handles them. If it likes the "(small) text
files" that Perforce creates, that might be good. I would say that the
"right" answer depends on what particular hacks the client's host OS
offers that would make it possible to build symlinks or their analog, and
detect relevant changes to same.

In the absence of a "good enough" symlink facility in the OS, I like
Perforce's idea of just dumping them as small text files, because I can
then still make changes to them on another OS, and, conceivably, use them
from with scripts and what-not, if those scripts are aware of what the
host OS is and how to treat those files on that OS.

-- 
   Tripp Lilley  *  http://stargate.eheart.sg505.net/~tlilley/
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