Do symbolic link files survive SVN?
Let's say I create a symbolic link file inside an SVN managed path, commit the path to SVN, and later checkout the path.
Will the symbolic link file survive?
If the symbolic link file is made up of a relative path, will it work "everywhere" a checkout is done?
Are there gotchas?
In general, Yes.
However, some clients don't work with symbolic links properly. Subclipse, for the Eclipse IDE, creates directories instead of symlinks.
So it's best to make sure your client is doing it right before getting into development.
From the Subversion Features page:
Symbolic links can be versioned.
Unix users can place symbolic links under version control. The links are recreated in Unix working copies, but not in win32 working copies.
Yes
As long as permissions aren't changed, it should.
Won't work on Windows checkouts.