[darcs-users] symbolic links

[Albert Reiner]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 10:16:21PM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
> > What I want is for darcs to ignore that those are symbolic links, and
> > to treat the file contents as if they were hard links or copies, at
> > least as an optional behavior.  This also seems to be the behavior of
> > least surprise, and it is the way things used to be.
> 
> What would happen if both the symlink and its target is under version
> control.  Do you record and apply the same change twice?

This rarely happens, but in case it does, the same change is recorded
twice (in two different patches).

> If you want symlinks, isn't it easiest to have a (version-controlled)
> script set them up? 

The script (actually, a Makefile) is version-controlled.  During
normal work I do not care about that file as the repository never
leaves my computer anyway.  When a project (say, a paper) is near
completion, however, I want the files that are normally present just
via symlinks to be archived in the repo just to ensure that I can
still build everything with data in that one repo alone.  (The
symlink-creating script does not replace a file with a symlink if the
target cannot be found.)  And I do not want to change the Makefile at
this point.

IOW, during normal work it is valuable to have symlinks (so that
changes I make to the file affect the link's target); but towards the
end when it is unlikely that the file's contents change any more, this
becomes a problem if darcs suddenly thinks the file no longer belongs
into the repo.  (In the final stages when corrections concern typos
and other minor things mostly, I am not likely to pay a lot of
attention to the individual changes proposed by darcs, and am rather
likely to `record -a`; effectively, I then loose the contents of the
symlinked file.)

Thanks for your comments,

Albert.