Controlling eGit's treatment of symbolic links

Question

I am setting up a project that will be shared among several programmers at my organization. We are using git--to which I am a newcomer. The project directory includes symbolic links to documentation directories that should not be under version control. I want to maintain the symlinks under version control as symlinks, rather than having them dereferenced and all of the content of the symlinked directory placed under version control.

I find that the git command line tool behave the way I want: git add -A. However if I try to use the Eclipse version of git, eGit, to add all the currently unversioned files, using Team->Track on the project context menu, eGit wants to add every file in the symlinked directories. Is there a way to tell eGit that, no, these are really symlinks, and should not be dereferenced?

Answer 1

Our problem was discussed in this: Eclipse Community Forums Thread

It looks like currently the Linux native lstat support is not too easy to make portable. The Least Common Denominator paradigm that they have for programming Eclipse in Java make it harder to do Linux or Mac native stuff. (read: *cough* Windows doesn't support symlinks *cough*).

The good news is:

It seems possible, but they'd need to code it in a way that complies to their 'Write Once Test Everywhere' programming standards. I feel that it's important to have some native stat and lstat support on Linux when using EGit because of this problem, as well as Eclipse bug #346079.

Simply having EGit installed causes slowdowns & IDE freezes when doing a Git Refresh :-(

The bad news is:

These two bugs are stopping me from using EGit for the majority of my git commands. The user experience makes EGit unusable for me. It would be really nice to be able to use EGit within Eclipse so that Mylyn User Stories & Tasks could be tied to feature branches automatically. It would also be great to have the automatic commit message template features. This would make putting the current task & status in the commit message a breeze.

This is bugging me almost enough that I'm ready to see if it's possible to make some scripts to query Eclipse / Mylyn for the current commit message template output, and do the git commit from the commandline using this. I'm not sure how automatic per-user-story feature branch creation would work though.

Until these problems get fixed, I'm sure a lot of EGit users will not be happy :-(