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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 11:23:08 +0100
From: Stefan Sperling <stsp@elego.de>
To: Michael Beyer <sunny.cloud@gmx.de>
Cc: dev@subversion.apache.org
Subject: Re: Disable symlink creation
Message-ID: <20120206102308.GA31223@ted.stsp.name>
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On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 09:00:11AM +0100, Michael Beyer wrote:
> Dear Subversion-Developer-Team,
> 
> I'm using subversion on a linux platform and I want to checkout symbolic links on a FAT32 partition (USB-Stick). I know, FAT32 doesn't support symlinks. But instead of an error message while running svn co, it would be nice to have an option to disable symbolic link creation. I mean, I want the linux svn client to ignore the "svn:special" property, similar to an windows svn client.
> 
> I hope, you can help me. I spent several hours to find a solution.

This is an open feature request:
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2472
You can add yourself to the Cc list of that issue to be informed
about progress.

I agree such a feature would be useful.
I doubt anyone is actively working on this, though.

A workaround you could try (haven't tested this myself) is to compile
a subversion client without HAVE_SYMLINK symlink defined in
subversion/svn_private_config.h. Run configure as usual, and then remove
the line that says "#define HAVE_SYMLINK 1" before running make.
This should give you a client that doesn't support symlinks at all
and you can use this client for working copies on the FAT32 partition.
Maybe that will help.