Re: difftool -d symlinks, under what conditions

On Mar 12, 2013, at 4:16 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Matt McClure [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

An alternative approach would be to reuse git-diff's option parsing

I do not think you want to go there.  That wouldn't solve the third
case in my previous message, no?

I think I don't fully understand your third bullet.

* If you are comparing two trees, and especially if your RHS is not
  HEAD, you will send everything to a temporary without
  symlinks. Any edit made by the user will be lost.

I think you're suggesting to use a symlink any time the content of any
given RHS revision is the same as the working tree.

I imagine that might confuse me as a user. It would create
circumstances where some files are symlinked and others aren't for
reasons that won't be straightforward.

I imagine solving that case, I might instead implement a copy back to
the working tree with conflict detection/resolution. Some earlier
iterations of the directory diff feature used copy back without
conflict detection and created situations where I clobbered my own
changes by finishing a directory diff after making edits concurrently.