Why does `git clone` override global core.symlinks on Windows?

Question

I found that git clone sets local core.symlinks value as false by default even when I have set core.symlinks as true .

> git config --list --show-origin
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       core.symlinks=true
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       core.autocrlf=input
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       core.fscache=true
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       color.diff=auto
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       color.status=auto
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       color.branch=auto
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       color.interactive=true
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       help.format=html
file:"C:\\ProgramData/Git/config"       rebase.autosquash=true
-- snip --

> cat .git/config
[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = false
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    symlinks = false
    ignorecase = true
[remote "origin"]
    url = https://github.com/saschanaz/eslint-plugin-import
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/master

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

core.symlinks is, regrettably, overloaded in Git for Windows.

If you have core.symlinks set to true when you create a repository (whether by running git init or git clone ), then git will actually attempt to detect if symlinks are supported in the working directory you're creating, and if so, it will then set the repository's core.symlinks to true.

If they are not supported (because, for example, you didn't enable Developer Mode) then the repository's core.symlinks configuration option will be set to false .

So the first option serves as a mechanism that you can specify if you want symbolic links. The second acts like a cache of whether symlinks are supported on the platform so that it doesn't need to detect this during every operation (much like core.ignorecase ).

Answer 2

This was because I didn't enable Developer Mode and thus git couldn't create symlinks without admin privilege. Enabling it allows future clones to get proper symlinks.