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Re: Feature request

From: Andy Levy <andy.levy_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2007-09-13 20:27:12 CEST

On 9/13/07, fj <fj@effjay.com> wrote:
> Edward Lau wrote:
> >
> > Hi Good Folks:
> >
> > Tortoise SVN should make Unix symbolic links and MS-Window short-cut
> > interoperable. At present, Unix links are converted into a text file.
> >
> > My use case:
> >
> > We operate in both MS-Window and Linux environment.
> >
> > Documents and scripts are developed in both environments.
> >
> > To reduce duplication, symbolic links are used in our Linux
> > environment and also checked the links into SVN. For us these links
> > are all pointing to a common parent directory within the same repository.
> >
> > When my user check-out or update a project in a MS-Window'
> > environment, these Unix links should be converted into a MS-Windows
> > short-cut.
> >
> > When my user check a MS-Window short-cut and commit them into the
> > repository, they should be converted into a Linux symbolic link.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> actually, windows since w2k supports real posix - type links. would it
> not be possible to simply use those "real" links across both unix and ms
> win os's, and just forget about dealing with shortcuts altogether?

Support for the NTFS version of symlinks would have to come from the
Subversion libraries themselves, not TSVN. And it's not as easy as it
may sound:

1) All *NIX filesystems I've been exposed to support symlinks. FAT,
which is still common in the Windows world (believe it or not) does
not. So you'd need to check the filesystem your WC is being created
on, and only do it if it's NTFS
2) What happens if you move your WC (with a symlink in it) which was
created on an NTFS drive to a FAT drive (like a USB stick)? Or a
network share (let's not go through the "maybe you just shouldn't put
a WC on a network share" discussion for the purposes of this
exercise)?
3) What if, on NTFS, you create a symlink which points at another
partition (I don't know if this is possible)? What happens when you
check out to a non-drive-letter OS (anything but Windows)? Or even
another Windows workstation with different drive letter mappings?
4) Legacy support. I'm not sure whether SVN itself supports pre-Win2K or not.

I'm sure there are a lot of other design/implementation questions I'm
leaving out here, but it's not a trivial undertaking.

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Received on Thu Sep 13 20:23:35 2007

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