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Git symbolic links in Windows

Our developers use a mix of Windows and Unix-based OSes. Therefore, symbolic links created on Unix machines become a problem for Windows developers. In Windows (MSysGit), the symbolic link is converted to a text file with a path to the file it points to. Instead, I'd like to convert the symbolic link into an actual Windows symbolic link.

The (updated) solution I have to this is:

Write a post-checkout script that will recursively look for "symbolic link" text files.
Replace them with a Windows symbolic link (using mklink) with the same name and extension as dummy "symbolic link"
Ignore these Windows symbolic links by adding an entry into file .git/info/exclude

I have not implemented this, but I believe this is a solid approach to this problem.

What, if any, downsides do you see to this approach?
Is this post-checkout script even implementable? I.e., can I recursively find out the dummy "symlink" files Git creates?

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– Community Bot

2023-10-03 08:20:35 +00:00
Commented Oct 3, 2023 at 8:20

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Git symbolic links in Windows

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