Re: [RFC PATCH] cogito --- don't overwrite metadata files in place (breaks CoW use)

[Chris Wedgwood <cw@f00f.org>]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 09:37:00PM +0000, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> >  if [ "$newhead" ]; then
> >  	echo "Committed as $newhead."
> > -	echo $newhead >$_git/HEAD
> > +	echo_to_file $newhead $_git/HEAD
> >  	[ "$merging" ] && rm $_git/merging $_git/merging-sym $_git/merge-base
>
> Good intentions, but wouldn't the above clobber symlinked HEAD?

Yeah, but I would argue that is the right thing to do.

Symlink'd trees don't really make sense to me (they seem fragile and
somewhat pointless) but perhaps I'm missing something?

> Not a fundamental flaw, though.  You need to see if it is a symlink,
> readlink it (repeatedly until you get a regular file or dangling
> symlink target that does not exist --- immediately after git-init-db
> has such a HEAD) and run your echo_to_file on the link target.

I don't see how that's helpful.  The idea of echo_to_file is to make
the metadata self-contained to the subtree --- so we don't want to
have external links (possibly) pointing outside of it.