How to repeat:
launch nautilus
Go to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com
enter "pub"
note that all of the files look like broken links, but doing ftp via the
terminal shows they are not.



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2000-10-24 13:48:42 ----

The code that decides whether symlinks are broken is in
nautilus_file_is_broken_symbolic_link. It just checks the file type and returns
TRUE if the file type is GNOME_VFS_FILE_TYPE_SYMBOLIC_LINK. It assumes that we
use follow_symbolic_links whenever we're looking up file info, so that the file
type will never be GNOME_VFS_FILE_TYPE_SYMBOLIC_LINK unless the target couldn't
be found. This assumption seems to be true for local files but not for FTP. It
is probably potentially different for each gnome-vfs module.

How should we deal with this? Possibilities include:
1) for non-local files, always assume all symbolic links are non-broken. This is
sometimes incorrect, but "less incorrect" (and certainly less confusing) than
assuming they are all broken.
2) actually check for the existence of the target file when determining whether
symbolic links are broken. We would want to cache the result of this, I think,
so we would probably want to do this in each gnome-vfs module and store the
result in another flag or something.
3) Have each gnome-vfs module specify whether or not they can tell whether a
symbolic link is broken. This could go along with (1) or (2).



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-10-24 13:51:01 ----

My theory is this: The FTP module is missing the "follow links" feature.

This screws up the gnome-vfs API.



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2000-10-24 14:23:47 ----

Darin's theory is correct. There is now a FIXME at the right line in
ftp-method.c. There was already a commented-out gprint statement at exactly the
line where the code is missing.



------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-08 17:28:39 ----

This is fixed at the Nautilus level. More thought needs to be put into how to
solve this at the ftp level. Both Pavel and I agree that it is very resource
intensize to resolve symlinks when a directory read happens using ftp.



------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:46 -------