On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 14:20, Todd Gleason <todd.glea...@elekta.com> wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Andy Levy [mailto:andy.l...@gmail.com] >> Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 2:23 PM >> To: Lars Tiefland >> Cc: Brown, Michael; Peng Yu; users@subversion.apache.org >> Subject: Re: svn support for symbolic link? >> >> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 16:10, Lars Tiefland <ltiefl...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > But: Only a Linux / Unix client will preserve symbolic links. On >> Windows the >> > link will become a normal file. >> >> Actually, it'll be a file that basically contains "you should be >> looking at another file, look over there". The link isn't "resolved" >> to the file it points to. > > I believe Windows 2000 and up (NTFS 5.0+ really) supports junctions that are > nearly identical to Unix symbolic links. See > http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284 . At the very least directory > symbolic links are supported, and file links may be as well. So is there a > good reason for svn not to support this in Windows? >
True symlink support in NTFS (at the level that's required here) didn't come until Vista. IIRC, junctions aren't as identical to *NIX symlinks as they seem. Does Vista/Win7 have a good way of creating/managing symlinks, or is it one of those command-line programs you only know about if you go looking for it? In Subversion, it's actually APR which would have to support symlinks I believe, and then you'd have to do some FS "sniffing" to check whether you are working on a disk which really does support it.
