Re: [RFC] Treatment of symbolic link

[Shigio YAMAGUCHI]

> Maybe you don't want to follow links that go out of
> the source tree

I completely recalled the reason. Thank you for your
pointing out.

Global works in a source tree, that is, a project.
But symlinks which point an outside directory of the tree
break this concept. For example,

        /home/src/      (a project directory, it has GTAGS)
               +-lib/
               +-src/
               +-foo (symlink)
                  |
        +---------+
        |
        +-/sys/bar/ (outside of the project, it doesn't have GTAGS)

Though the 'foo' directory seems to be in the project,
it is not actually so. It brings an inconvenient operation
like follows:

$ cd /home/src
$ global -x main
main           10 src/main.c main(int argc, char *argv[])       <- work well
$ cd foo
$ global -x main
global: GTAGS not found.                                        <- doesn't work
$

I felt this imperfect, and made a decision to ignore symlinks.
But now, I think it should be left to the users.

> In other words: garbage in, garbage out, right? ;)

Right.
I want to remove limitations as much as possible, and
expand the width of the selection of users.

Though symlinks which points an outside directory of the
source tree might confuse global(1), the user can avoid
the problem by setting variables GTAGSROOT, and in htags(1),
there is (maybe) no problem.

I would like to add a disclaimer like follows to the online manual of gtags(1).

 Global(1) works in a source tree, that is, a project.
 Symlinks which points an outside directory of the
 project might confuse global(1). You should understand
 what you are doing.

> Well, here is my user point of view: most of the time I use global on an 
> already existing source tree (I often work in open source software 
> integration in my day job, and global helped me a LOT), with a layout 
> intended for eg. the build system, and not for global. So, for me, it is 
> best if I don't have to "fix" the tree because it confuses global (eg. 
> dangling symlinks seemed to be a problem). But as of today, I can live 
> with global as it is. :)

I heard such opinions from other people too.
--
Shigio Yamaguchi <address@hidden> - Tama Communications Corporation
PGP fingerprint: D1CB 0B89 B346 4AB6 5663  C4B6 3CA5 BBB3 57BE DDA3