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Re: svn support for symbolic link?

From: Andy Levy <andy.levy_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 14:54:31 -0400

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 14:20, Todd Gleason <Todd.Gleason_at_elekta.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Andy Levy [mailto:andy.levy_at_gmail.com]
>> Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 2:23 PM
>> To: Lars Tiefland
>> Cc: Brown, Michael; Peng Yu; users_at_subversion.apache.org
>> Subject: Re: svn support for symbolic link?
>>
>> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 16:10, Lars Tiefland <ltiefland_at_gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > But: Only a Linux / Unix client will preserve symbolic links. On
>> Windows the
>> > link will become a normal file.
>>
>> Actually, it'll be a file that basically contains "you should be
>> looking at another file, look over there". The link isn't "resolved"
>> to the file it points to.
>
> I believe Windows 2000 and up (NTFS 5.0+ really) supports junctions that are nearly identical to Unix symbolic links.  See http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284 .  At the very least directory symbolic links are supported, and file links may be as well.  So is there a good reason for svn not to support this in Windows?
>

True symlink support in NTFS (at the level that's required here)
didn't come until Vista. IIRC, junctions aren't as identical to *NIX
symlinks as they seem.

Does Vista/Win7 have a good way of creating/managing symlinks, or is
it one of those command-line programs you only know about if you go
looking for it?

In Subversion, it's actually APR which would have to support symlinks
I believe, and then you'd have to do some FS "sniffing" to check
whether you are working on a disk which really does support it.
Received on 2010-05-25 20:55:26 CEST

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