Allow recently-used.xbel to be a symbolic link
Many programs, especially file managers traverse through the list of recently used files and look which of these still exist in the file system. That can cause unnecessary disk drive spin-ups. I started thinking about recently used files and how I would like to have it configured in general. I rarely use that feature, but if I do I am usually looking for very recent files, more recent then a day, e.g. after I took a screenshot and I want to upload it afterwards.
For that reason I tried to replace ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel with a symbolic link. I was hoping to get rid of all that recent activity with every reboot. That did not work. Also linking to /dev/null was not successful. The file was always recreated.
I found the reason in the source code of glib: gtk uses g_bookmark_file_to_file, which again uses g_file_set_contents and that is, where the Doxygen comments say why this happens, that links will break and files be recreated. I do not think, that this is intended behavior. Why should somebody forbid the user to create such a symlink?
I have implemented a possible patch, but I cannot make a merge request out of that, because I have just registered and no push permissions here.