From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Not going beyond symbolic links
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:01:10 -0700
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Cc: git@vger.kernel.org, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>,
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To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> ... Because this is definitely not a black-and-white "one behavior is 
> wrong and one behavior is right".

I wish I could agree with you that this is a feature, but 16a4c61
(read-tree -m -u: avoid getting confused by intermediate symlinks.,
2007-05-10) and 64cab59 (apply: do not get confused by symlinks in the
middle, 2007-05-11) came from real world breakage cases and the root cause
was that we were too lenient to allow such a "feature" that pretends the
symlink not to be there.

Right now, we are being careful only while branch switching and patch
application, but the codepaths that add directly to the index (add and
update-index) are not fixed (or "still has the feature").

I do not see a clean way to keep such a "feature" without hurting users
who suffered the bugs these two commits from May 2007 fixed.