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Ilya_Shlyakhter 2018-09-18 18:41:02 +00:00 • committed by admin
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[[!comment format=mdwn
username="Ilya_Shlyakhter"
avatar="http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/1647044369aa7747829c38b9dcc84df0"
subject="comment 3"
date="2018-09-18T18:41:01Z"
content="""
The main reason for wanting git-annex to follow symlinks, is that the semantics of its commands (get/add/copy) operating on directories would be much more intuitive.
I want to know that after 'git annex get subdir' all annexed files accessible under subdir/ are available; that after 'git annex add subdir && git annex move subdir --to my-remote' all
large files accessible under subdir/ are at my-remote; etc. I want to be able to treat a subdirectory as a self-contained unit. But this isn't possible if relative symlinks stored
undir subdir/ but pointing outside subdir/ might still be broken after 'git annex get subdir', etc.
E.g. I have
proj1/
big_file.dat: symlink to ../.git/annex/objects/....
proj2/
big_file.dat: symlink to ../proj1/big_file.dat
then if I do 'git annex get proj1', I can safely work on proj1 knowing all its files have been fetched; but if I do 'git annex get proj2', I can't safely work on it because
the symlink proj2/big_file.dat is still broken. I can of course make proje2/big_file.dat a direct link to the annex, but that loses the relationship between proj1 and proj2.
It's pretty common to want to create a \"variant\" of a project by making most files in proj2/ symlinks to corresponding files in proj1/ , except for a few files that differ.
With 'git annex add', it'd help a lot to know that 'git annex add /my/dir' will definitely store _everything_ under /my/dir. In fact, if a symlink under /my/dir points outside the
repository, git-annex could still store the target file in the annex and check in a symlink to that (or perhaps warn the user about the situation). Then I can 'git annex add' my local
setup, even if it points to some absolute paths, and check it out on another machine, with all links working.
\"Supporting this would require that git-annex stat every file that non-git-annex symlinks point to\" -- only ones that point outside the subdir being worked on. If the target of
such a symlink is a directory, you'd need to process that directory too. But if this all is off by default, and turned on by a flag, then the normal operation won't be affected.
"""]]