Re: [PATCH] Disable USE_SYMLINK_HEAD by default

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 13:18 +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:

Dear diary, on Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 12:09:42PM CET, I got a letter
where Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] said that...

quoted

I think Junio is right: we should not force everybody not to use symlinks, 
only because there happens to be VFAT-, SMB- or HTTP-shared repositories. 
As Junio says, if there are people experiencing problems because they lack 
symbolic links, they should fix it.

I'm ambivalent here. I would like to have just a single behaviour here,
since the symbolic ref otherwise really does not get much testing. But I
can also understand that we are breaking tools here.

Still, for the reason above, I think we should aim at the symbolic refs
being the canonical format in the next major release after 1.0, giving
users time to fix their tools. I can see no advantage in symlinks except
the backwards compatibility - speed argument was presented, but I don't
buy that until I see hard data supporting that.

I planned to write about symrefs long ago, and probably I waited for too
long.  I still hope it will be the default for 1.0 release, but if not,
I hope the next release won't be too far away.

quoted

On the other hand, I think it would be useful to be able to configure the 
behaviour via .git/config.

Yes, I would very much like to have this. I still want to go
symrefs-only for public repositories created for cg-admin-setuprepo, so
that fetching over HTTP works properly.

Agreed.  By the way, the symref doesn't need to be called HEAD - it
could be "trunk" or "main" or "default-branch".

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin