Symlinks are ignored

Hi,

I chose Synchting over BTsync because it doesn’t ignore linux file permissions, but now I can see that it ignores symlinks… which BTsync supports. Am I missing something?

Thanks, Lucian

It’s a tricky problem to solve, there are a lot of corner cases, and people generally don’t agree on how it should work. Rsync has six different switches just for symlinks and it doesn’t even try to handle Windows, for example.

Thanks, I guess I can make due without it for a while.

If the intention is to sync direcotires as they are, I belive that copying symlinks is what’s expected (what else would you expect?). Anything else results in the synced copy being different from the original.

Windows does support symlinks.

Is there any other OS that’s believed to not support symlinks? AFAIK, almost all other current OSs are either unix-link, posix-link, or linux-based, all of which would support symlinks.

Well, if you read the github tickets you’ll see that people expect various things ranging from “copy as they are” to “follow and copy content only” via “rewrite to relative links” and “convert to .lnk files”. Hence, expectations vary. Copying verbatim is the easiest, but will often result in the symlink not pointing to what it is supposed to point to on another computer. Some might expect this, others not.

I’ll take it! Whoever wants to use symlinks know how they work, they should be pointed at relative targets.

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So the way I think about symlinks is that they are just files with some content, and with some permissions bit set which the OS interprets specially. If we think about them this way, then I think its easy to implement symlink support, and it’s hard for me to see how that would go wrong apart from user error.

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True. Protocol wise they could be a file with the “Symlink” bit set, with he contents being the link destination. No protocol changes needed.

I don’t know if we want to do slash conversion on that, but that’s a minor detail.

I don’t know why people would expect something different than “copy the file as is”, from a file sync program. This issue, IMHO, is in their expectations, no the software.

The “average Joe” that does not understand what symlinks are, is unlikely to create one inside their synced directories anyway.

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The average joe doesn’t use symlinks. I’m not an average joe and would like that the symlinks are synced.

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This is now in there thanks to Mr. @AudriusButkevicius. Go break it! :wink:

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