[rfc] Windows symlink support

[John Arbash Meinel]

Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> 
>>I would like to add a small point here. One very useful use case for
>>versioning /etc is not for backups, but actually for system
>>administration over multiple machines.
> 
> 
> I had a rant brewing earlier, but decided against posting it because it was
> less about bzr support for symlinks and more about best practices.  (I
> realised I wasn't opposed to bzr supporting symlinks if people really think
> they want it.)
> 

Well, I don't disagree about best practises being to not include symlinks.


> 
>>Say you version /etc/hosts.allow, they you can push around that change
>>so that all the machines now have a new entry in hosts.allow.
>>
>>Or you modify the configuration for httpd, and you have multiple
>>machines running for distributed workload.
> 
> 
> I don't see how you're using symlinks in either case, but for the sake of
> argument:

My symlinks are in ~/bin/ into my 'dev/' tree where I have the programs
that I'm working on.
And my 'dev' is generally formatted the same (it is already version
controlled because everything inside is generally a project).

And in /etc you have symlinks for /etc/init.d or /etc/rc?.d/ which
change what starts up when.

> 
> Both these use cases are more easily solved using management agents like
> puppet or cfengine; pushing symlinks out from your RCS is a terrible way to
> handle this.  Usually one requires a tool run after the RCS push to modify
> the final layout.  In such a case I've found it best to let this tool do the
> linking itself, and leave the symlinks out of revision control.
> 

Well, that would be another tool I need to find/learn. (Never having
heard of either of those before). Also, one of my home directories is on
cygwin, so those programs would have to be ported.

> 
>>Some people version $HOME, which I have started playing around with.
>>Mostly because I have 10 different machines I work on, at various sites
>>(home, work, laptop, school, etc), where doing an NFS mounted home
>>directory is not possible (kind of hard to do on an airplane), but it
>>also sucks to try and keep my ~/.vimrc .vim/* in sync.
> 
> 
> Again, not symlinks :)

I think it would be nice to have a 'best-practises' support in bzr. So
you can define some policies such as 'don't use symlinks', 'don't case
fold', etc.

But I would want that to be something people have to specifically
enable, rather than getting in the way (tla got in the way a little too
much).

John
=:->
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