Re: Make links point to original folder

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 16:03 +0200, David Prieto Ucha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> I would like to attract your attention to this bug I just filed in
> Launchpad:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/157432
> 
> It regards a part of Nautilus behavior that has always bugged me, and
> has been recently noticed by a close relative who is beginning to
> learn Linux: Nautilus treating links like they were separate folders
> instead of... well, links. 
> 
> The bug shows several drawbacks I find to this approach, but I would
> like to know if it has advantages too, that justify it being used.
> So... are there?
> 
> I'm not subscribed to the list, by the way. So please, when you reply to this mail could you CC me? 

This has been an issue of debate multiple times. In fact, the behaviour
of nautilus wrt this has flip-flopped multiple times during its
lifetime. Each time we change it the other half of the users gets upset.

The decision we've made wrt to this is that we treat symlinks like they
were designed, i.e. the links look likes normal files/directories. This
means that internal system details like /home being a symlink
to /mnt/sdb2 or whatever doesn't show up in the ui when you click on the
home icon. 

However, the other side of the coin is that having the other form of
links, (which is generally called "shortcuts" in the UI) is very useful
too. And the idea is that we should support symlinks fully in the UI to,
as a separate kind of entity (implemented on disk as *.desktop files).
Unfortunately while this is partly supported in nautilus, the UI for
this has never fully been fleshed out. I'd appreciate if someone wanted
to own this and work on it!