Re: Not going beyond symbolic links

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 11:11:11PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

The thing is, the "feature" is not very well supported, even without the
fixes from last night.  If you have a symlink "sym" that points at "dir"
that has "file" in it, and if neither "sym" nor "dir/file" are tracked,
you can "git add sym/file" to add it (I called it a bug).

Well, I actually used this feature less than a year ago and did not have
any problem with that. Not that it is very important for me now, but I had
makefiles in a separate build directory, and I used a symlink to move
building to a tmpfs partion, which sped up building slightly.

Obviously, if a symlink points to a directory inside of the repository
and then you use "git add sym/file", it is definitely a mistake. OTOH,
let's consider the following situation:

git init
mkdir newdir
touch newdir/foo
git add newdir/foo
git commit -m 'add foo'
mv newdir /tmp/
ln -s /tmp/newdir
touch newdir/bar
git add newdir/bar
git commit -m 'add bar'
git ls-files

And you can see:
newdir/bar
newdir/foo

Git does exactly what I want here!

Anyway, I more concern with performance impact of your patch. If it
is noticeable, then it would be nice to have an option to turn this
check off.

Dmitry