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by darkpuma 2559 days ago
Symlinks in general suck on OSX. Try symlinking a file from an NFS mount onto your desktop and see if you get a thumbnail for it in Finder. In Finder, you won't. Now you might think, "well that's NFS, it's probably not thumbnailing those files because the latency exceeds some timeout." That's what I thought. However if you add that same directory containing such symlinks to your dock, you will see thumbnails for symlinked files when previewing that directory from the dock. If MacOS can thumbnail those symlinks when previewing the directory from the dock, then why can't Finder thumbnail those same symlinks?

(Also in third party Finder alternatives, like Commander One, you will typically get thumbnails for symlinks.)
1 comments
CamperBob2 2559 days ago
They suck on Windows, too. I've tried using junction points more than once to share a common library directory among several different projects, and have always ended up in makefile hell when some projects 'see' changes to files in the library directory while others don't.

I can understand why Dropbox doesn't want any part of the dumpster fire that is symbolic linking. Maybe they work great on Linux, where they are a core aspect of how the filesystem works under the hood. But Dropbox has to present unified behavior across all supported platforms, and the last thing they want is to be put in the position of providing tech support for filesystem bugs and quirks and race conditions.

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darkpuma 2559 days ago
Yeah, when it comes to cross platform stuff I'm pretty forgiving with this sort of thing. Finder botching it sends me up a wall though. It's probably only a few lines of code at most to fix it, but Finder is closed source so I can't investigate it myself, let alone fix it, let alone send my fix upstream.

(And frankly I'm hesitant to even report it as a bug, since for all I know Apple will decide that NFS/symlinks getting thumbnailed in the dock preview is the real bug, and "fix" that leaving me worse off than before.)

Edit: Also sort-by-kind also fails in Finder when symlinks are involved. When "keep folders on top" is set, symlinks will still sometimes (but not always) appear above folders.

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