Symbolic links should be supported

Tortoise SVN should make Unix symbolic links and MS-Window short-cut interoperable. At present, Unix links are converted into a text file.

Well, actually no. Windows Shortcuts are not symlinks, they aren't even close. Attempting to use one as a substitute for the other is a bad idea.

But doesn't Windows since Win2K support real posix-type links?

Again, no. Those links (which work on NTFS5 only, not FAT32) are not symbolic links but hard links. Those are completely different from symbolic links. Windows refers to them as reparse points. For example, the junction points for directories (which is what resembles the linux hardlinks the most) are created by using reparse points.

But I heard that Vista has real symbolic links.

Correct, Vista now has 'real' symlinks. But there are still some problems which will lead to incompatibilities anyway.

• it only works on Vista
• symlinks are limited to 31 per path (I don't think Linux has that limitation)
• only admins are allowed to create symlinks - which means the whole
  feature is pretty much useless in svn since (I hope) that most users
  don't have admin rights anyway

But finally, and most important of all, any such handling of links would have to be handled outside of TSVN. It has to be done in the Subversion library, or even better in the apr library.