Symbolic link support is not working

[sirnewton01]

Symbolic links are not working in a few different ways. For example, if you have a broken symbolic link that points to a non-existent file/folder and the target has a space in it when you run this command it fails:

$ git update-index --add link
link does not exist and --remove not passed

If you have a symbolic link to a file and the link is not broken you can run this command:

$ git update-index --add foo.txt

However, it adds it to the index as a regular file, not a symbolic link, which you can see by running a git status with either dgit or standard git. Note that the latter will also flag a type change as there is an inconsistency between the type of the entry in the index and what is on disk.

[driusan]

It sounds like this:

dgit/git/index.go

Line 310 in d61922f

fstat, err := file.Stat()

Needs to be using os.Lstat rather than os.Stat and this:

dgit/git/index.go

Line 241 in d61922f

ModeBlob, // Directories are never added, only their files, so assume blob

Needs to check the filemode to see if it's a symlink and use ModeSymlink instead of ModeBlob if so.

Are the hashes correct? Presumably the content is wrong (the content of the file rather than the filename) if we're not checking whether it's a symlink, it's probably just reading through to the content and there also needs to be some intelligence added to the caller(s) to AddStage.

[sirnewton01]

I haven't dug into he details too much. It just looks like dgit doesn't really handle symbolic links. If the goal is for dgit to work on Plan 9 then that isn't a problem since Plan 9 doesn't have any symbolic links. However, the standard git test suite uses them for a lot of the test scenarios so without symbolic link support it is difficult to use that test suite to find other problems.

[driusan]

The goal should be to work on any platform that Go supports, but Plan 9 is the place where it's most useful since there's no access to the real git client.

The real git client works on Windows, so the best thing to do is probably see how it works there and try and do the same thing.

[driusan]

Both of these should be working now, I added a test case for them but I'm sure there are other bugs hidden in other commands with symlinks, so if you find anything else feel free to open another ticket.