symlinks cause 'svn add' to abort

i know that most of you are busy with finishing up 1.1 and getting it
out the door and i wish you best of luck with that and am cheering you
on, as it were...

despite that i was wondering if you all had time to answer a question i
had.

(in the event that it matters, i am using svn version 1.0.0 on debian
stable)

when doing 'svn add *' in a directory under which there are symlinks,
at the point at which svn arrives at a symlink it just quits with
"svn: Unsupported node kind for path '<path>'", despite there being
potentially many suitable candidates for adding.

not knowing all of the implications, i think, "it would be nice if it
emitted the warning, skipped that file or directory (and everything
beneath it if applicable) and kept going along". i wouldn't be inclined to
care one way or the other if my current work around were less undesirable.
i could either commit everything (if it's a new repo i can svn revert *)
and then do some sort of gnarly combination of:

svn st | grep -e ^?| awk '{print $2}'

and

find -type l

and

grep -v

and then wrap 'svn add' around all that.

questions:
    * what are the reasons for having 'svn add' abort rather than skip?
    * is there a better way of dealing with this than the way i am dealing
      with it (assume that the response "yeah, get rid of the symlinks" is
      not an option in my case).
    * if changing the behavior to skip rather than abort is on the menu, how
      high or low on the menu is it (if you know more or less, estimates are
      fun to have, if not particularly reliable)

googling for 'svn add symlink' returned some things such as:
http://www.contactor.se/~dast/svnusers/archive-2003-08/0248.shtml

but i don't know *why* it aborts nor did i find a less kludgy way of working
around it.

i suspect that setting properties and using an "ignore list" would probably
be somewhere in the ballpark of the answer...though i don't know what
specific aspect of those things apply to this situation...(still learning)

just to mention it, i *have* read the entire subversion book though i might
have missed it if there is an answer in there. please advise.

it was indicated to me that actually supporting symlinks altogether was a way
off if at all so i am basing those questions off the assumption that full on
symlink support is not going to come along and make all these questions moot.

thanks for you time and committed, good work,
marcel

-- 
Marcel Molina Jr. <marcel@vernix.org>
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