[Thunar-dev] linking root paths

[Benedikt Meurer]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> Hey Benny,
> 
> xfdesktop allows the user to drag (for example) the 'File System' icon
> from the thunar path bar to the desktop, or to a folder icon on the
> desktop, if for some reason they want to make a symlink to '/'.
> However, thunar-vfs seems to explicitly disallow this, and throws a
> critical warning.
> 
> The culprit seems to be line 258 of thunar-vfs-io-ops.c, in
> _thunar_io_ops_link_file():
> 
> _thunar_vfs_return_val_if_fail (!thunar_vfs_path_is_root (source_path),
>                                 FALSE);
> 
> Is there any reason for this?  I can easily do "ln -s / ~/file-system"
> from a terminal; why doesn't thunar-vfs allow it?

There's no real technical reason for this. It's more of a usability
feature. Well, it doesn't make sense for the average user (actually for
no user at all) to introduce this kind of cycles in the file system. The
"File System" is the same as the "Harddisk" item on OS X for example. A
special item that refers to the root.

> 	-brian

Benedikt