Re: [RFC/PATCH] Use work tree to determine if it supports symlinks

[Sascha Cunz <Sascha-ML@babbelbox.org>]

On Friday, July 27, 2012 03:58:49 PM you wrote:
> Sascha Cunz <Sascha@babbelbox.org> writes:

> > Ok, so repository and working directory are simply not meant to be on
> > different file systems. Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> I did not mean "and that is a rule we need to enforce and keep
> forever".
I did not parse your statement as such - I just realized, that i probably 
won't find a valid use case for using 2 file systems with different 
capabilities. Which lead me to conclude that your "is not supported" is a 
sufficient response.

Though, I think I have a valid use case for using different file systems: For 
speed reasons one could setup .git to point to a different drive. I wanted to 
try this ever since I saw, it would be possible - but I never came around 
actually trying it.
However, if this would turn out to be an improvement, I don't think one would 
mix file systems with different capabilities (i.e. FAT+ext2).

> I was just answering your (implied) question "why does
> code comment, behaviour and documentation disagree?", to give a data
> point that would be useful when discussing what the ideal behaviour
> should be.

I think, that 'git init --separate-git-dir' (without a 'different filesystems' 
restriction) is some kind of support for creating non-bare repositories where 
work tree and .git dir are located on different file systems.

Then, in case a user _did_ setup a peculiar layout, an invocation of 'git 
submodule init' might make a call to 'git clone', which _should_ set 
core.symlinks to false but doesn't. At that point the user might not remember 
in detail how peculiar the setup actually is - and at the same time did not 
request git to do anything special.

I don't know how far-fetched that is, but it's at least possible.