Re: Having Git follow symlinks

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se> wrote:
> Is there a (per-repo) setting to get Git to follow symlinks in the working
> directory, i.e., to not store the symlinks themselves but rather work on
> what they point to?

Not that I know of.

> Background: I have a repository that stores a number of my dotfiles, shared
> between all my machines (Linux, OSX, Windows/CygWin, Solaris). It is
> currently a CVS repo that I wish to convert to Git since CVS is getting more
> and more scarce. However, I have the repo set up so that I check it out into
> a subdirectory of its own, and have symlinks (junctions on Windows) both
> coming into it (for files that live in ~) and out of it (for subdirectories
> of ~ that cannot be symlinks themselves, such as ~/.ssh, or that live
> elsewhere, such as under AppData on Windows or ~/Library on MacOS). CVS
> handles this by simply not knowing anything about symlinks, and I would like
> to get Git to do the same.

I believe a preferable way to manage dotfiles in Git, is to have a
script that does the necessary setup/installation from the repo (that
lives in some subdirectory of ~) and into ~. This script would be able
to:

 - Set up whatever symlinks or copies are needed
 - Apply permission/mode bits that are not stored by Git
 - Properly handle various platform differences (symlinks vs. junctions, etc.)

As a bonus, you can run the script as a post-checkout hook, to have it
automatically apply any updates you fetch/push into your dotfiles
repo.


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net