what does 'ignore symbolic links' do?

[Thomas Troesch <ttroesch gmail com>]

Under Edit->Preferences->File Filters there is a check box to ignore symbolic
links. �It does not seem to have any effect.

The link I have is to the parent directory in my working copy. �This is
convenient for me because I am writing perl modules, and this way it is easy
to write test programs that always 'point' to my working copy from svn. �This
becomes a circular reference from the Meld point of view, and when the files
are listed, flat or otherwise, it recurses until something runs out of room. �(
about 40 times, about 500 chars in the path name ).

I also tried to add a pattern that matched the name of the link, but it had no
effect. �I didn't expect much there because the name of the link is the same as
the parent directory.

Any ideas?