Question

Somebody already asked how you can get git to follow symlinks. There was an answer for a symlinked directory, but not for a symlinked file. It was also over a year ago.

Question: how do you get git to follow a symlink and add the file it refers to?

Here is the old question: How can I get git to follow symlinks?. There’s also a question about what git typically does How does git handle symbolic links?. I’m after a way of changing this behaviour.

In case you care: I’m running git 1.5.4.3 on unix and git version 1.6.0 on mac.

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure there’s no way.

Additionally, it sounds like a kind of insecure, undefined behavior – what should it do when you move between versions of the file and it needs to write to it? In particular, if you check out a revision before it was added, do you really want it to remove the contents of a file outside the repository? What happens if you come back to present and recreate the file, or if the symlink itself is modified – should git also track the symlink itself?

Things along these lines were said on the git mailing list late last year in response to essentially the same question.