Re: difftool -d symlinks, under what conditions

[Matt McClure <matthewlmcclure@gmail.com>]

On Mar 12, 2013, at 4:16 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Matt McClure <matthewlmcclure@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 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.