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List:       fossil-users
Subject:    Re: [fossil-users] symlinks (was Re: xkcd on git)
From:       Warren Young <wyml () etr-usa ! com>
Date:       2015-11-05 16:38:56
Message-ID: 76C95F1D-1B58-4F19-9E2D-4C62F3A0C239 () etr-usa ! com
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On Nov 4, 2015, at 11:52 PM, Stephan Beal wrote:
> 
> You've hit it right on the head: POLICY. No SCM should enforce project-specific \
> policies, and symlinks (for me) fall into that category.

I can argue the reverse on the same basis: Fossil shouldn't be making a policy \
decision about what I put into my repository, just because it might not work on some \
other platform that I'm not using.

You may say that I might later want to check the repo out on that other platform, but \
the consequences here really are not that dire.  If you check a symlink into the \
repo, and some future Windows native symlink feature is added to Fossil, and you \
can't use it because $REASON, you can fix it in trunk on a POSIX box and try again.

All you've lost is the ability to check old versions of the code out on that \
platform.

Yes, that means you can't do things like bisect against old versions, but clearly if \
you're using symlinks, you've got platforms around that will let you do the \
bisection.  And you probably don't have a platform-specific bug to bisect in this \
case, since you clearly weren't checking the repo out on Windows back when the \
symlink was added.

War story: I use Adobe Lightroom quite a lot.  (Which is based on SQLite, by the \
way!)  A couple of versions ago, it stopped letting me name folders with a trailing \
dot,[*] which is perfectly legal on OS X, but illegal on Windows.  I don't use \
Lightroom on Windows, but Adobe doesn't let me use a feature of my OS because I \
*might* someday want to move that catalog to Windows.

The result is that Lightroom now enforces an LCD policy on file names, refusing the \
union of the restrictions of Windows and OS X on both platforms.  So, trailing dots \
aren't the only annoying restriction.  The inability to use colons is another, for \
example.

I don't want to be mollycoddled.


[*] If you're wondering why I might want to use a trailing dot on folder names, I \
sometimes abbreviate people's last names, when the initial is all I need to \
disambiguate the name.  I want to call the folder "Stephan B.", not "Stephan B". \
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