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RE: RE: Symlinks on Win32...

From: Gale, David <David.Gale_at_Hypertherm.com>
Date: 2006-01-31 19:39:18 CET

Duke Tantiprasut wrote:
> I think it would be good if SVN can natively support symlinks within
> its internal repository tree and manage it itelf rather than relying
> on the file system that is checked out on.
>
> Perhaps something along the lines of:
>
> svn link svn://source svn://dest
>
> The idea is rather than creating a copy (i.e. branch), it would allow
> changes to files in that directory to flow through and not branch.
> Bidirectional would be good, but even just unidirectional link
> svn:externals would be a good start. Editing svn:externals is
> troublesome, it's not easy to just add and remove directory members,
> especially when you need to automate.

I'd second this idea.

Given:

/foo
  - file1
/bar

svn link svn://example.com/foo/file1 svn://example.com/bar/file2

Should produce:
/foo
  - file1
/bar
  - file2

At which point, the following should be true:
svn co svn://example.com/
cd bar
<change file2>
svn ci
cd ../foo
svn stat -u
U file1

Ideally, "svn link" would support the various wc/repository options that
svn copy & svn move do (wc->wc, wc->repo, repo->repo, repo->wc). It
shouldn't be possible to link to a file that has been deleted (use copy
to resurrect a file instead), as this is rather non-sensical. Only
changes to the contents of a file should propagate; copying/moving a
file shouldn't affect links (or break them--this would be better than
symlinks on linux!), as there isn't anything requiring linked files to
have the same name. I think property changes should also propagate, now
that I'm thinking about it.

Any other design thoughts? Any votes against, or shall we pass this on
to the dev list?

-David

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Received on Tue Jan 31 19:43:24 2006

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