[darcs-users] symbolic links

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 04:18:46PM +0100, Albert Reiner wrote:
> I am quite sure that symbolic links used to work fine with darcs.
> Recently, however, I have been encountering strange behavior where
> darcs always wanted to remove files from the repository that I never
> requested be removed.  Looking into this, it seems to be related to
> this sorry behavior:
>
> ,----
> | $ touch ../a
> | $ ln -s ../a bar
> | $ darcs add bar
> | Sorry, file bar is a symbolic link, which is unsupported by darcs.
> | 
> | darcs failed:  No files were added
> | $ darcs --version
> | 1.0.7 (release)
> `----
> 
> How can I get darcs to treat symbolic links transparently, i.e., as
> referring to the pointed-to file?  `darcs help add` does not seem to
> give any pertinent information.  Unless I have overlooked anything, I
> would suggest some general option to --dereference-symbolic-links that
> I can stick into my preferences file.

I'm not clear what you would like darcs to do with symbolic links.  Do you
want darcs to delete the symbolic links when file contents change? That's
the only sane behavior I can imagine, but it hardly seems useful.  Perhaps
you could give us a hint what you want to do with symbolic links, and why
you think they'd be better than just copying the file contents.

> At any rate, automatically flagging items for removal from the
> repository seems an extremely unfortunate design decision, especially
> if the behavior I want and is likely to be expected by many users was
> present in earlier versions.

Perhaps you could point to a bug report describing the behavior you
describe? Or file such a bug report? I really have no idea under what
circumstance this is happening to you, running what darcs commands, or how
to reproduce it.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University