Nautilus should disallow copying of symlink to FAT drive early
Submitted by Jonas De Vuyst
Link to original bug (#324930)
Description
Please describe the problem: When trying to copy a symlink to a FAT drive one gets a weird error dialog. It says (I translate):
Error "Operation not permitted" when copying "$filename".
Do you want to continue?
[Cancel] [Retry]
So, first the dialog is phrased oddly. It doesn't explain why the 'operation' is not permitted, nor what that operation is (a casual user might think 'copying' is not permitted). Second, there's no use for a retry button.
Thus, a new error dialog should be created.
But possible Nautilus should also never try to copy the symlink in the first place. Consider the following scenario:
- You have a file named "A" on a FAT file system (common for thumb drives)
- You have a symlink "A" on your desktop
- Drag the symlink to the the FAT file system => A dialog pops up "Do you which to replace file A?"
- You click "overwrite", not realising there's a problem => File "A" on the FAT drive is deleted and not replaced by the symlink
This latter part of this bug report is related to bug #64668, but I don't imagine that bug will ever get fixed.
Note that an alternative solution to this bug could be to copy the target of the symlink instead of copying the link, whether for all links or only when copying a link to a different volume (which is already a special case when dragging and dropping regular files). I think I'd like this behaviour better, but I imagine this behaviour has been debated and dismissed long ago.
Steps to reproduce:
Actual results:
Expected results:
Does this happen every time?
Other information:
Version: 2.22.x