Comment 19 for bug 365242

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 10:34:47AM -0000, Scott Barnes wrote:
> I was definitely hoping, given its target users, that Ubuntu One would
> support symlinks directly (as actual links, not duplicating or ignoring
> them). I was really hoping to have a nice way to keep my themes, icons,
> and various other things in sync between my systems without the pain of
> something like DropBox where every single icon that would normally be a
> link to another filename instead becomes a copy, and suddenly a 2mb icon
> theme takes up 8mb. But if Ubuntu One completely ignores symlinks then
> it's *even less* usable for that, since all the icons linked to multiple
> names would go missing entirely. I really think the best solution for
> the majority of users is to handle symlinks as links, not duplicating or
> ignoring them, which would also keep it consistent with how most Ubuntu
> users expect their files to work.
>

the problem, and the reason we decided to postpone symlinks, is that
there isn't a clear "this is what users expect"; there are at least
two separate camps that argument in pretty much the same way (“you
should do it this way, because *everybody* expects it to work this
way!”), but those ways are actually opposite: Some people expect
symlinks to be stored as symlinks, some people expect them to be
followed.

We will, at some point, support symlinks. However, this won't happen
before we also support synchronizing multiple folders (rather than
just ~/"Ubuntu One", which will make the other half of the people
happy). Unfortunately these features won't make it into Karmic
(although you will be able to use them if you use our PPA).

Cheers,