[darcs-users] New argument for symlink support

[Trent W. Buck]

Henrik Hjelte <henrik at evahjelte.com> writes:

> The absence of symlink-support makes it impossible to migrate a lot of
> repositories to darcs from other revision control systems. Adding a
> script that manages symlinks (like update-symlinks.sh) script is not a
> solution for that.

Why isn't it a solution?

It's the approach used by every other VCS I've seen to support *some*
kind of metadata that isn't handled internally.  Specifically, I've seen
etckeeper[0] add metastore[1] to git hooks, and when etckeeper grew
support for Darcs I saw it replace metastore with an internal script
that handled symlinks, xattrs, timestamps, permissions and empty
directories.

This git patch[2] demonstrates the basic approach.

[0] http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/etckeeper/
[1] http://david.hardeman.nu/software.php
[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/105133