Subject: Re: Symbolic link documentation

From: "Shawn O. Pearce" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:11:00 -0400

"Matt Seitz (matseitz)" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> The git-update-index and git-update-ref manual references are the
> closest to what I was looking for.  Both are more low-level and
> technical than what I was hoping for, and the discussion in
> git-update-index seems targeted primarily at how symlinks are translated
> on file systems that don't support symlinks.
> 
> I guess I was looking for something like the GNU "tar" documentation of
> how symlinks are handled
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/dereference.html#deref
> erence).

Git never dereferences a symlink that are stored as part of the
revision data.  The only time we dereference a symlink is when it
is used inside of .git/refs, or as .git/HEAD, which is what the
git-update-ref manpage was talking about.

So Git handles symlinks in the working tree *without* dereferencing
them.  Internally we store the target of the symlink, much as
tar would store the target of the symlink.  There is no way to
activate a dereference behavior (--dereference / -h in GNU tar)
as typically you want to preseve the symlink as a symlink to the
target; its part of your source code.

Maybe this is a good hint that the user manual should have a section
on symbolic links.  Its obvious to old Git hands that a symlink is
nothing more than a file with a slightly different mode, but that
may not be obvious to people who are new to Git.

-- 
Shawn.