Re: Proposal for bug 73937 / symlinks in nautilus

[David Watson <dwatson cs ucr edu>]

I think this is a good point.

The problem with deciding to treat symlinks as "bookmarks" instead of
"filesystem fixups" is that these two approaches conflict.  For example,
imagine that my home directory is a symlink.  Then when I enter "/home"
from "/" my path ends up being "/some/other/place" when it shouldn't be
(because in this case the symlink really is a filesystem fixup).
Unfortunately, as a user, I don't get to decide if symlinks are used in
this way.  However, I do get to decide to create a bookmark if that's the
functionality I want...

Also, I'm not really sure that symlinks should ever act like bookmarks.
I'd rather have symlinks be first class objects just like other
directories.  If you want a bookmark, I think you should use a bookmark
because frankly, symlinks are not powerful enough to do everthing you
might want to do with a bookmark (e.g. you can't do virtual folders with
symlinks).

So, any chance we could revert the revert?

 - David

On 21 Jan 2003, MArk Finlay wrote:

> Nautilus should treat system links like system links. If users expect
> that when the create a link with nautilus for it to not behave like a
> system link and more like a windows shortcut, then it seems obvious to
> me that the thing to fix is not how nautilus interprets system links[1]
> but how nautilus creates lunks/shortcuts.
>
> Maybe nautilus should create launchers instead of syslinks.