Question

My development server has my project hosted at /path/to/project/version_number, with the path /path/to/project/Live symlinked to the latest version number.

In the working directory, svn update . works as expected, but svn update /path/to/project/Live results in

Skipped '/path/to/project/Live'

This is with subversion v1.6.11 (r934486) on a CentOS 6.2 machine.

Is this expected behavior? I think that it might be related to bash behavior with symlinks.

Answer 1

What OS are you using? What is the actual command and output? How are you accessing your repository? Are you using http://, svn:// or just file://?

Few version control systems handle symlinks. This is especially true on systems that are made for a wide variety of operating systems since not all operating systems handle links or symlinks quite the same way. In fact, some don’t even have the concept of symlinks.

Subversion doesn’t follow symlinks. In fact, it really doesn’t store symlinks. In the Subversion database, they’re marked with the property svn:special and probably is stored with the data to reconstruct them. It is up to the client to create them and handle them.

My recommendation is not to use symlinks in a version control system. Creating such creatures should be part of the deployment or build script. This way, you have more control over them. You can check the OS, make sure it can handle these types of links before creating them, and then create them in such a way that the OS can handle them.