[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="Ilya_Shlyakhter"
 avatar="http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/1647044369aa7747829c38b9dcc84df0"
 subject="imports and symlinks"
 date="2022-08-19T20:19:50Z"
 content="""
Re: new manpage description that says

>symbolic links in the directory being imported are skipped to avoid
>accidentially importing things outside the directory that import was ran
>on

In my use cases, skipping symlinks (instead of importing them as git symlinks) would make the imported tree unusable by tools that expect specific filenames in specific subdirs of the tree,
when these filenames were symlinks in the original tree.
Could the symlinks be imported as standard git symlinks instead of skipping them?  Worst case, a checkout of the repo will have symlinks to non-existing targets -- this can be fixed by mounting volumes with the right paths.  OTOH, having filenames missing from the imported tree because they happened to be symlinks in the original tree can cause all sorts of errors.   Import is much simpler to think about if it's guaranteed to replicate the full original tree structure, like `tar` does.
"""]]
