symlink copy/move behaviour
- From: Felix <thetrivialstuff@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: emelfm2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 17:32:54 -0700 (PDT)
Hi,
I messed up a significant portion of my filesystem by assuming that
emelfm2 would copy/move symlinks as symlinks (it instead descended into
them as directories, which caused enormous problems when it hit one that
linked to its parent directory).
I looked through the configuration (in advanced mode) and even did a quick
grep through the config files, but the only thing I could find that might
suggest a setting for this was 'transparent-dir-links', which corresponds
to the "interpret relative paths" setting and has no effect on this
problem.
To re-create the bug:
from a shell:
mkdir one
mkdir two
cd one
ln -s ../two linktwo
cd ../two
ln -s ../one linkone
then, go into emelfm2, and try to copy either one or two somewhere else.
Emelfm returns with "cannot copy all of ..." and if you go into the
directory it created, you'll see that you can go quite a few levels into
linkone/linktwo/linkone/linktwo/linkone/linktwo/linkone/linktwo ...
(which are now all directories, not symlinks).
After my little mishap with this, I managed to restore my home directory
by comparing with a recent backup, and have since switched to the original
emelfm and never looked back (I almost prefer it actually, for the
following reasons:
- I find the autocomplete behaviour in the directory lines very annoying,
because it frequently results in things like
"/mntnt/driverive/directoryectory--dammit!"
(I'm often still looking at the output pane or the directory panes when
changing dirs, so I won't notice when the autocomplete has fired)
and
"/m<tab>--k why didn't that work? oh, right--nt/<tab>--huh? oh,
right...--"
- it's a lot harder to drag things unintentionally (this happens to me in
emelfm2 a lot because I somehow associate full row selection hilights with
"no dragging possible" and icon/filename-only selection hilights with
"this is a draggable user interface" -- midnight commander, xplorer2,
2xexplorer, directory opus, emelfm1, ws_ftp, windows explorer, mac OS
finder, etc. all encourage this kind of thinking or have settings that
cater to it)
- right clicking multiple items and clicking info creates a barrage of
info windows. admittedly emelfm1 also has this problem, but somehow I'm
not tempted to press the info button there... maybe because my brain goes
"this is old software, remember the properties dialogue didn't work yet"
in there, and "ok, they should've fixed that by *now*" in the new one?
(I expect some kind of summary for all the items; if I select 50 files I
expect to have to deal with one window, not 50.)
)
Anyway, all that stuff is pretty low priority for me, since I found that I
can change directories with the command bar (and tabbing works fine
there), and I'll go back to using emelfm2 again just as soon as I feel I
can trust it with my files...
~Felix.
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