cannot create symlinks on smb share mounted with gvfs

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

When I mount an smb share with gvfs (e.g. through Nautilus), I expect that symlinks can be created on that filesystem. This is possible if I use "mount -t cifs" instead, but that is a more manual and less flexible process that should not be necessary.

To reproduce:
1. in Nautilus, mount an smb/cifs share with "smb://<address>"
2. right-click a file/directory in the nautilus view
3. from the context menu, pick "Make Link"

Expected behaviour:
A link to the selected file/directory should be created, as would occur on a local ext4 filesystem

Actual behaviour:
I get an error saying "The target doesn't support symbolic links".

My guess is that this is because gvfs' smb implementation doesn't implement the kind of UNIX extensions that the Samba cifs client uses.

[Sridhar Dhanapalan (sridhar)]

If I try from the terminal:

$ ln -s File File2
ln: creating symbolic link `File2': Operation not supported

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Sridhar Dhanapalan (sridhar)]

Upstream bug report

[Sridhar Dhanapalan (sridhar)]

Whoops, I meant to say that the upstreal report is at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677397