Re: GtkFileSelection and symbolic links

[Christian Starkjohann <cs obdev at>]

Jamie Guinan <guinan@bluebutton.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > But I think things can be improved a bit - by choosing the
> > directory to complete from to be as long as possible.  The
> > following patch tries to do this. It won't perfectly solve your
> > problem - if you go to the /home directory it is going to stat
> > all the subdirs, but it should help.
>
> That's fine!  I don't have a problem with it stat-ing directories
> in /home when I *select* /home, I just want it to leave /home alone
> when I haven't selected it.  I encounter the same automounter issue
> when I do,
>
> $ ls --color -l /home
>
> so its no worse than that.
> [...]

I have implemented an automounter for our Sharity product. I've found that  
many applications don't work well with an automounter because they stat() and  
readlink() the automounter's symbolic links. Not much fun if several 100  
shares are automounted...

Looking for a solution, I came across a convention on Openstep/Nextstep:  
They use the sticky-bit of symbolic links. If a symbolic link has set the  
sticky-bit, it's considered an automount and all applications (such as 'ls'  
or the file manager) avoid a readlink unless they really want to access files  
behind the link.

Does anybody know of similar conventions on other platforms to avoid massive  
mounts by automounters? Maybe it would be a good idea to implement it in  
Linux/GTK/Gnome, too?


--
Dipl.-Ing. Christian Starkjohann
Objective Development
mailto:cs@obdev.at | http://www.obdev.at/