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A comment on Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of your Dropbox account. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by theon144 on Saturday August 31, 2019 @12:47PM (#20847392)
> Dropbox’s magic symlink following has always been the anti-pattern

Uh, what?

Following symlinks is the default behavior for unix programs that requires extra effort to work around, why would it be "magic", or an antipattern?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by theaino on Saturday August 31, 2019 @03:43PM (#20848396)
Dropbox was replacing symlinks with the target file or directory tree in synced copies. This obviously breaks legitimate symlinks since the whole point of having the symlink is to have a reference to the target, not another copy of the target.

It’s really simple: symlinks are symlinks and should be synced as symlinks. Now they are.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by codetrotter on Saturday August 31, 2019 @01:23PM (#20847588)
In the context of file archival and synchronization.

Just like how when you tar up a directory, the symlinks are stored as symlinks, not as the files they point to.

[ Parent | on HN ]