Re: what does 'ignore symbolic links' do?

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 20 October 2010 17:02, Thomas Troesch <ttroesch gmail com> wrote:
> Under Edit->Preferences->File Filters there is a check box to ignore
> symbolic links.  It does not seem to have any effect.
>
> The link I have is to the parent directory in my working copy.  This is
> convenient for me because I am writing perl modules, and this way it is easy
> to write test programs that always 'point' to my working copy from svn.
>  This
> becomes a circular reference from the Meld point of view, and when the files
> are listed, flat or otherwise, it recurses until something runs out of room.
>  ( about 40 times, about 500 chars in the path name ).
>
> I also tried to add a pattern that matched the name of the link, but it had
> no effect.  I didn't expect much there because the name of the link is the same
> as the parent directory.
>
> Any ideas?

You haven't actually said, but I'm guessing that you're talking about
a version control comparison? The ignore symbolic links preference
does what it says on the box, but currently it only works in directory
comparisons, not VC ones.

Please file a bug. If you could provide a simple example repository,
that would be awesome too. It's a little complicated because of the
different ways that different VC systems deal with symlinks. Of
course, we currently just don't handle it, so anything is better than
the status quo.

cheers,
Kai