Windows junctions are not supported in Subversion 1.8.0 anymore

Hello,

I'm working heavily with Windows junctions in my development
environment, meaning that e.g. I check out a working copy in an
Eclipse workspace using Subclipse and afterwards create a junction to
my httpd cgi-bin directory. Please note that I do not link deeply into
the working copy but create the junction to the working copy root. One
example: The directory ...\Eclipse\Perl\some_project contains my
working copy checked out using Subclipse, afterwards I manually create
...\httpd\cgi-bin\somewhere\some_project as a junction to the
some_project folder in my Eclipse workspace.

This allowed me to use Subclipse within Eclipse and TortoiseSVN in
Windows Explorer depending on what I need to work on in my web
application, which gets served by the current code base developed in
Eclipse. This worked without any problems for years now with older
versions of Subversion, but starting with 1.8.0 I get the following
error:

svn: E200007: Symbolic links are not supported on this platform

This is not bug 4383, my client doesn't crash, it simply shows me the
error message. Besides that, the bug's status is still new, but the
changelog for 1.8.1 mentioned it as fixed.

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4383
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/tags/1.8.1/CHANGES

Is this behavior by design or a regression? I don't understand why
Subversion needs to detect Windows junctions just to tell me that
those are not supported. Couldn't it just use them as a plain
directory like in older versions, including 1.7.x with the already
new WC-NG format? Windows junctions are completely transparent to any
application not caring about them.

I find a bit annoying that Windows not only doesn't get the support
for symbolic links, junctions etc. like other OS do, at least where
possible, but that things which used to work before for years are now
specially recognized just to tell me that they are not supported
anymore. This is the second time were I relied on that things like
hard or symbolic links, junctions etc. were treated at least
transparently by Subversion and though would just work and got a bad
surprise. I couldn't find any mention in the changelogs as well,
besides the following:

* optimize file/dir truename checks on Windows (r1435527)

But looking at the code this seems to focus on names, not types of
entries for directories or files.

I would really appreciate if the old behavior could be restored or one
can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Besides telling me to use some other
OS, of course. ;-) Thanks!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Thorsten Schöning

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