Re: following symbolic links and access to '..'

["Emmanuel Dupoux" <emmanuel dupoux gmail com>]

Further thoughts:
the problem with the "launcher" trick is that it only works for opening a nautilus window  from an
already opened directory; however, you cannot use launchers from elsewhere, for instance
from within a file open dialog box. In other words, the launcher trick does not truly implement  the notion
of a navigation shortcut which, I am sorry say, is a very useful feature in Windows. [As soon
as you have a big directory structure and start to use a graphics interface,
navigation shortcuts (for easy handling of current projects) are extremely useful.]

Now, if someone were to implement navigation shortcuts in Linux, he/she might as
well do them in a dynamic fashion: if I move or reorganize part of my tree structure,
all of the shortcuts are broken; a dynamic shortcut (implemented using backward links in the
target directory) would repair them on the fly. (This was my wishful thought of the day.)

Cheers
-e

2008/8/10 Emmanuel Dupoux <emmanuel dupoux gmail com>

2008/8/10 Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>

Am Freitag, den 08.08.2008, 08:20 +0200 schrieb Emmanuel Dupoux:

> if you open a directory through a symbolic link
> you are stuck in the subpart of the directory tree that is pointed by
> the link.
> It is a major pain in the neck. Is there a way to access the ..
> directory?

No, because that's how symbolic links are supposed to work, and how they
work in a UNIX shell.

You are perfectly right! I was so much used to the Windows shortcuts,
I thought it worked the same in Unix. [There is a slight inconsistency within nautilus,
though, that confused me: when you open a term using the right
click 'open in a terminal' within a directory pointed to via a symbolic
link, it does open it with the 'real' physical path, not the symbolic path.]

If you want a shortcut rather than a "pseudo
duplicate", you have to create a launcher, for instance by
right-clicking on the desktop, chosing "Create Launcher..." and entering
the target URI into the dialog. You can then move the launcher wherever
you want.

yes; I created a launcher for nautilus with the appropriate directory as target;
it works perfectly; thanks!

I have been thinking about more intuitive ways of exposing the launcher
vs. symbolic link concept, but I could not come up with a satisfying
solution. Maybe both should be called "Link", and for local links you
have two right-click context menu entries

[ ] Symbolic Link
[X] Launchable Link, or Shortcut

 
This would be great! (Shortcut is a good name)
by the way, this would allow to modify the path of the symbolic
link, which you cannot do at present.

Toggling would replace the symlink with a launcher and vice versa. The
proposed naming is poor, a concise naming that is intuitive for the
majority of users has to be found. In essence, the difference is

"behaves-like" vs. "points-to".

 
it looks like a difference between intensional vs denotational semantics.

thanks again
Emmanuel

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Emmanuel Dupoux
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