Comment 29 for bug 81689

Hello,

I was wondering if the solution to this issue should be considered to consist of two parts.

  (a) Enable checkout of branches containing symlinks on windows. Show warnings about symlinks with commands like branch, status etc. This should be simpler and can be done in the short term.
  (b) In the longer run other options like those discussed in this bug can be explored to give a more complete solution.

IMHO, (a) should unblock a most users like me who need this feature. In my particular case, we have a situation where the repository resides on unix while some users would prefer to use windows along with various IDEs for editing the files. The users are OK if the symlinks don't exist on Windows. So, just having the ability to checkout the branch should help a lot.

I have created an initial patch for (a) in the branch lp:~parthm/bzr/81689-win-symlink-warning with the "branch" command working on Windows. If (a) seems like a good approach, I could work more on the patch and update other commands and tests to complete the patch and put it up for further review.

Following is the log of whats working ("branch"). As can be seen, commands like status and diff still need work:

D:\ext-src>brun branch lp:~parthm/+junk/project-with-symlink

D:\ext-src>c:/python27/python.exe d:/ext-src/bzr.dev/81689-win-symlink-warning/b
zr branch lp:~parthm/+junk/project-with-symlink
Unable to creat symlink "softlink" on this platform.
Branched 2 revisions.

D:\ext-src>cd project-with-symlink

D:\ext-src\project-with-symlink>ls
hardlink hello

D:\ext-src\project-with-symlink>bzr st
removed:
  softlink@

D:\ext-src\project-with-symlink>..\brun diff

D:\ext-src\project-with-symlink>c:/python27/python.exe d:/ext-src/bzr.dev/81689-
win-symlink-warning/bzr diff
=== removed symlink 'softlink'
=== target was u'hello'