Editing Advanced Installation (section)

==Keeping programs separate==
User programs are ordinarily kept in a subdirectory of RSFSRC/user.  However, if you want to keep your programs separate all you have to do is put your subdirectory somewhere else and make a link to it in RSFSRC/user:
<bash>
ln -s path_to_my_programs $RSFSRC/user/my_programs
</bash>
The additional instructions above for "multi-user installs" are for the case where the other users do not have write access to RSFSRC.  However, if you have full write access and only want to keep the programs in a separate place the link is the only thing you need.

===Problems when symbolic linking and using SVN=== 
If you decide to use a symbolic link e.g. "ln -s ..." as above, you will have difficulties checking in your code into the SVN repository.  SVN typically does not follow the symbolic link but will only the save the symbolic link.   

See this answer from Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24850844/follow-symlinks-in-svn)


<blockquote>


If I understand your problem, you have:

project1/
project1/link1 -> ../../some/where/else

If you do a simple svn add link1 it adds a symlink entry to the subversion repository, but what you're trying to accomplish is getting the stuff under somewhere else into the tree.

If this is the case, then you're fighting in the wrong direction, you should make the real files and directories under link1, and make the target locations symlinks into the link1 directory. That would be a simple solution to the problem.

Another solution would be to make the location ../../some/where/else an svn location in it's own right, and make link1 an externals definition to that location. When you commit in the main directory, the externals would be committed at the same time which would achieve storing the information; however to ensure that the other location was kept in sync, you would have to make sure to update it to the same version as the stored data.

In my case, on my desktop, I have a settings directory:

$HOME/settings

This is a checked out copy of a directory containing .bashrc, .profile, .vimrc, .vim, etc. files and folders from an svn repo. All my profile files and directories were symlinks into this folder, so for example .profile -> settings/.profile, etc. When I make changes, they are reflected in the svn tree, which I can commit back to in order to ensure that I don't lose my config settings when I go to another system.

If you really want svn to follow symlinks as hardlinks (You can't make directory hardlinks because it would be a bad thing™), then you'll have to hack the svn client source so that it did what you wanted; but this would be a maintenance nightmare.

You could get away with making the symlink into a bind mount point directed at the target, but that has it's own issues - you would need to be root to accomplish this, and it ends up leaving funny entries in your /proc/mounts to accomplish this:

mount --bind /absolute/path/to/some/where/else project1/link1
</blockquote>