Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of your Dropbox account

Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by Someone on Saturday August 31, 2019 @03:04PM (#20848181)

  /.bashrc -> ~/Dropbox/.bashrc
  ~/.vim -> ~/Dropbox/.vim/

That works for directories, but not for files such as ~/.bashprofile, if tools update such files by

  - writing the updated file under a different name
  - deleting the old file
  - renaming the updated file

as the second step would delete the link (or fail; I’m not too familiar with the UNIX APIs)

(I think that’s a fairly common strategy. I tried checking whether vim uses it, but got lost in https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/src/fileio.c; that file is too large to comfortably read on an iPad (try guessing how many lines of C it takes to ”Read lines from file "fname" into the buffer after line "from"”)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by codetrotter on Saturday August 31, 2019 @04:10PM (#20848537)

I’ve used symlinked bashrc and other files and edited them with Vim through their symlinks and never had the sorts of problem you theorized about.

I would consider the behavior you outline to be an editor bug. Symlinks are pretty important and any editor that would destroy a symlink and replace it with a regular file is clearly misbehaving software IMO.

[ Parent | on HN ]