Using .gitignore symbolic links?

["Tessa L. H. Lovelace" <tessa@assorted.tech>]

The recent release candidate of Git (v2.32.0) hit my OS this week, and 
it included a line () on symbolic links for several specific files are 
now ignored.

Thank you for putting the changelogs in an accessible location, knowing 
that this was a known breaking change was useful in debugging why my 
workflows stopped working.

I have two concerns.

First, the error thrown is

 > "warning: unable to access '.gitignore': Too many levels of symbolic 
links",

,,,which does not accurately represent what is happening.

I spent a bit of time convinced that I'd broken something with the 
symbolic links during setup, and an error such as "symbolic linking no 
longer allowed for 'filename'." would make more sense, given the change 
under discussion eliminates *any* use of symbolic links.


Secondly, and more personally important to me, a system administrator:
My repositories use symbolic links to allow a single .gitignore file to 
define my folder structure, allowing me to avoid hardcoding the 
repo-specific folder paths into my configs.

Is there a flag to disable this new behavior?

If not, this change means I need to update dozens of files, duplicates 
all, or completely rewrite my .gitignore files to have shyteloads of 
arbitrary file paths in them, which I'd rather not do.

Also, is there a justification for forcing this as the on-update 
default new behavior, when a user-querying behavior (such as with 'git 
pull' defaults as they've changed recently) exists?

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ref 
https://github.com/git/git/commit/142430338477d9d1bb25be66267225fb58498d92#diff-eae5facd145e2748250f7b275e45cb001c0b8e2c47c529a4e28bbfa208e5fb59R7


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Thoughts?

-- 
Tessa L. H. Lovelace
----
office:		503.893.9709
consulting:	assorted.tech