GtkFileSelection and symbolic links

[Quentin Delamarre <Quentin Delamarre sophia inria fr>]

Hi,

I'm using Gtk 1.2.2 installed on a Sun Solaris 2.6.

The problem I have is when I use the GtkFileSelection widget to
navigate in directories:

Suppose you have a directory "A/" in which you have
a sub-directory "B/" for example.
Suppose you have another directory "m/" in which you
have a sub-directory "n/".

Now suppose "B/" is indeed a symbolic link to "n/".


..../A/B/...

       |
       |  symbolic link (done with the "ln -s" command)
       V

..../m/n


When you explore the /A/ directory with the GtkFileSelector,
and when you enter into the B subdirectory, then going back with
the ".." item or with the history-pulldown menu will send you back
into m/ instead of A/. So you loose your initial path "..../A".

This is the normal behaviour for the "sh" users, but not for the
"tcsh" users (if the shell variable "symlinks" is set to "ignore",
for more info see "man tcsh").
In this case, the system "remembers" the last directory, and this
is IMHO very useful. You don't need to re-enter the original
directory where the link was, if you only wanted to see what was
in the subdir /B.

Would it be very difficult to implement? Or would it cause too
many cross-plateform problems? I get lost in gtkfilesel.c ...


  Quentin Delamarre.


P.S.
Did you read so far? Yes? So this is an other problem I have with
GtkFileSection:
I am connected to a big network. Under the directory /home 
are all the users who have an account. When I make a "cd" to
the directory "/home/my_account" with the GtkFileSelection widget,
I have to wait for 5 min, because Gtk is trying to connect to every
account it can!!! But this is useless since I only want
"/home/my_account".
So I am obliged to specify a local path "/local/my_account".
I think this is a serious weakness of GtkFileSection ... and
that it has something to do with symbolic links ...

Sorry for this too_long_message_in_bad_english and thanks in
advance for any clue.


-- 
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Quentin Delamarre  --  projet RobotVis  --  INRIA Sophia-Antipolis
email: mailto:Quentin.Delamarre@sophia.inria.fr           (France)
URL: http://www.inria.fr/robotvis/personnel/qdelam/qdelam-eng.html
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