Ye olde issue of symlinks

[Simon Perreault]

Hi, this is my first post to this mailing list.

I work for Linux Québec Technologies (www.linuxquebec.com), so when I say 
"we", that's us.

We're having problems with the way CVS handles symlinks. Here is how we are 
setup:

We are programming a WWW administration interface (think Webmin), and so 
there are project files scattered all over the test machine's filesystem. 
What we do is that every programmer has its own development machine (be it 
VMware or physical) and mounts every partition using NFS. Then we have our 
personal ~/cvs directory which contains tons of symlinks to files and 
directories on the NFS-mounted partitions.

This works fine if the symlink is pointing to a directory: files inside that 
directory get committed and updated fine. But when the symlink points to a 
file, the only way to have cvs commit the file is to remove the symlink and 
recreate it. But we can't use this to solve the problem since when we do it 
on a file that hasn't changed, the file still gets committed.

I don't think turning on PreservePermissions would solve the problem as the 
symlinks are not intra-project. What we would need is a way to have the 
symlinks be considered as normal files.

Does anyone have ideas that could help us?

Thanks a lot in advance.