Re: Attic headaches.

[Kaz Kylheku]

In article <address@hidden>, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>[ On Thursday, August 23, 2001 at 17:17:53 (GMT), Kaz Kylheku wrote: ]
>> Subject: Attic headaches.
>>
>> Here is another Attic-related problem: when files move into or out
>> of the Attic, symbolic links break. (I know, symbolic links are bad
>> and all that, but sometimes they are handy, in small quantities).
>
>DO NOT EVER put symlinks in your repository!!!!

Nonsense, the CVS code even has explicit support for symlinks.
When you are committing to a symlink, it will decode the link
and put the lock into the correct directory. That was fixed in,
oh I can't remember, 1.10.3 or thereabouts?

>You *WILL* break much more than just the automatic movement of files in
>and out of the Attic!!!!

Such as? I haven't had any other problems so far. The only thing to watch
out for is to clone the file prior to doing cvs remove on it.

I had a number of symlinks which I eventually treated this way; they
were useful temporarily when reshaping the repository.

Suppose you are tracking some outside sources that are arranged
in one way, but in your repository, the files are moved around a bit.
So what you do is keep a directory tree that has the original shape,
and then connect things with symlinks. So you can keep doing 
imports of the outside source, and the patches to the moved
files will go to the right place thanks to the redirection of the
symlinks. When you no longer need the outside source, you can break the
links, by duplicating the files.

>If symlinks are handy for you then you can handily create them for
>yourself in your build system!!!!

That is a little hard when the build system is on an operating system
that does not support symbolic links.

Also, symlinks in the working copy hardly provide you with the semantics
like the above scenario.