Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> writes: > On Fri, 11 Nov 2016, Jacob Keller wrote: > >> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > Dennis Kaarsemaker <dennis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> > >> >> No tests or documentation updates yet, and I'm not sure whether >> >> --follow-symlinks in other modes than --no-index should be supported, ignored >> >> (as it is now) or cause an error, but I'm leaning towards the third option. >> > >> > My knee-jerk reaction is: >> > >> > * The --no-index mode should default to your --follow-symlinks >> > behaviour, without any option to turn it on or off. >> > >> >> I agree. We shouldn't have to specify this for no-index. > > Ummm. *My* idea of --no-index was for it to behave as similar to the > --index version as possible. For example when comparing directories > containing symlinks. You seem intent on breaking this scenario. Perhaps a viable compromise between the two is to only always dereference at the top-level (i.e. the trees to be compared) under "--no-index" mode and not changing anything else? The original use case by Dennis is not even about doing a recursive two-directories-in-a-filesystem comparison and encountering a symbolic link (it was to compare two BLOBs, which happen to be output from two commands).