Comment 1 for bug 48444

Michael Ellerman wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> If you create a branch inside a shared repository, then create a symlink
> to the branch from outside the repository, you can't operate on the
> symlink as if it's a branch. Perhaps this is unsupported, but IMHO it
> should work.
>

There is an alternate use case, which is why we currently do not support
this.

Here is the example: You have a normal standalone branch in 'branch',
and inside of it you have a symlink 'symlink', which points outside of
the branch. Let's say "branch/symlink => /etc/hosts"

cd branch
bzr status symlink

Which you call because you want to find out whether 'symlink' changed
(now it points to /etc/hosts.allow).

If you dereference the symlink, you will jump into '/etc', and then
tracking back upwards would leave you with no bzr branch.

The difficulty is that you can give a path to a branch, or to a file
inside of a branch. And you may want to dereference a symlink to a
branch, but you don't want to dereference a symlink to a file.

If you can come up with decent heuristics about when something should
work, we probably could support it. But for now, we explicitly try not
to dereference symlinks.

John
=:->