Re: Ev2 symlinks

On 27.06.2013 21:16, Greg Stein wrote:
> On IRC, Branko noted:
> on the subject of ev2 api, i'm wondering if add_symlink and
> alter_symlink should really be there. it looks like special-casing on
> one type of special node
>
>
> There is *only* one type of special node. There are no plans for any
> other type of special node.

Yes, there are. And not only in my head, either. :)
I just haven't got around to starting a design doc.

> The current design of a pseudo-file is ridiculous.

I agree that better designs are possible. Certainly the pseudo-file
approach should be an implementation detail of the wire protocol.
However, I would hesitate to invent actual new node types because they
cannot be represented in older repositories, making the client<->server
compatibility problem harder.

> wc_db and Ev2 break out the three node types that we deal
> with: dir, file, symlink. As part of that symlink was added to
> svn_node_kind_t, so that we can talk about symlinks as first-class
> items.

Later in that same IRC log I concluded that talking about symlinks to
the WC makes sense, as they're something most filesystems know about.

> The svn:special design is horrible. For backwards compat and wire
> protocol purposes, we'll always have to deal with it, but we can fix
> our top-level APIs.

That depends on what you call a top-level API; mine for symlinks is
called "ln" :)

-- Brane

-- 
Branko Čibej | Director of Subversion
WANdisco // Non-Stop Data
e. brane_at_wandisco.com