Re: symbolic links

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, August 2, 2001 at 17:22:01 (-0700), Schwenk, Jeanie wrote: ]
> Subject: symbolic links
>
> One of the engineers here wants to keep the current symbolic links
> associated with a file so when he checks out file, the symbolic links are
> still there.  I found nothing in the documentation or in Fogel's book
> discussing symbolic links which leads be to believe it is not possible with
> CVS (or I need a better search tool).

Nope, it's not possible.  CVS only tracks the presense and absence of
normal files and changes to their contents.

>   The question is:  Is there a way to
> maintain the symbolic links for files when checking out and committing so
> they do not have to be set everytime they are checked out?

Symbolic links, because they might differ depending on their location
and which machine they're on, are usually considered to be products of
the build, not sources.  CVS is not a build system and has no provisions
for creating symbolic links.
 
However that doesn't mean you can't manage symlinks indirectly with CVS.

It's extremely easy to write a script (perhaps as a rule in a Makefile)
to create the appropriate symlinks as part of the build.  Such a script
therefore becomes a source file and is thus managable by CVS.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <address@hidden>     <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>;   Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>