while nautilus is basically capable of creating and displaying symlinks, its overall symlink support could be improved. this bug is created to track the various fields of issues around the topic -- once they are fixed, this bug can be closed and nautilus will have much better handling of symlinks.

issues mainly revolve around dereferencing symlinks (especially when copying), details of symlink creation (absolute vs relative); additional related issues are displaying symlink details and when to traverse symlinks.

there are also suggestions to include .desktop (/.lnk?) files in these considerations.

the bugs affected are (listing all i find here until i figure out how dupes are handled here):

* "i want symlinks to dereference {when copying to unsupported filesystems, when copying to removable devices, as a general option}": #308437, #581830, #623580, [rh201855]
* display symlink targets in status bar (akin to hyperlink targets in browsers): #68266
* allow dereferencing symlinks: #623580, #308437, #623124 (solved by the follow symlink extension[1], although afaik it only works for folders and not for files, for which it could open the containing folder and select the file), #622789 (rather about identifying that $PWD includes a symlink and jumping to the "physical" location)
* handle .desktop links similar to symlinks / use them as a fall back: #115805 (which i disaprove of), #607193, #358205 (does not mention desktop files itself, but solution offered in 607193), #614239 (which is quite special-case as only targetting the desktop, but valid -- having an icon on the desktop to open a frequently used directory is better handled with a .desktop file than with a symlink)
* offer follow/dont-follow options for recursive operations: #604572
* offer choice between absolute and relative symlinks: [rh154370]
* also mentioned in said reports; file operations should be aware of fs limitations before offering them

[1] http://p.outlyer.net/nautilus-follow-symlink/
[rh201855] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=201855
[rh154370] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=154370