On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:14:36 -0500, BandiPat <magicpage91 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The sym links are convenient, but I think you should save those for more > important work. In my specific situation, I have seven users who work on (currently) three weekly publications using Scribus. Soon to be four publications, I'm told. Through clever use of group permissions and symbolic links, I have everything important in several subdirectories of a subdirectory under /opt -- the templates for the papers, graphics, commercial ads, classified ad databases, and so on. As I'm (usually) a remote sysadmin for this application server, this allows me to simply rsync the /opt subdirectory to one of my local machines to provide me with a backup of everything that needs to be backed up, as well as a copy of the current data to work on as required. Scribus (and other X applications) are painfully slow to use remotely over a 128k uplink except in dire circumstances, so I try to do my work locally and just blast the data back to the server as needed. However, /opt over there is not /opt over here; on this box I stash that data on a nfs share that's actually located on a fileserver that I keep in my basement.. Complicated enough for you? It may not be exactly according to Hoyle, as it were, but it is very convenient. Having got that out of the way, the situation that got me concerned about this symbolic link stuff in the first place is that I use Scribus to create png files for a web page using the bargainhunter data that's in /mnt/cabinet/home/frankcox/bargainhunter/backup/scribus/regina, but I want to put my png files into /home/frankcox/bargainhunter/webpage/graphics.cache/regina, which is where my script for updating the webpage expects to find the current Regina paper. So I created a symbolic link in /home/frankcox/bargainhunter/webpage that points to /mnt/cabinet/home/frankcox/bargainhunter/backup/scribus/regina, thinking that I could then simply back up one notch to get to the web page after loading the Scribus document and telling it that I want to export png files. Nothin' doin'. When I select the "export to png" option in Scribus, I find that I am in /mnt/cabinet/home/frankcox/bargainhunter/backup/scribus/regina and not in /home/frankcox/bargainhunter/webpage/regina like I thought I should be. So I have to click and click and click and climb the whole darn directory tree again to get back to where I thought I would be in the first place after creating that symbolic link. Multiply that by three more papers, weekly. A simple example: If create a symbolic link /home/frankcox/link --> /mnt/arcade/home/games, then enter this sequence of commands into bash: cd cd link cd .. I find myself in my home directory at the end. If bash worked the way that Scribus appears to, I would find myself in /mnt/arcade/home instead, and that seems to defeat the purpose of having symbolic links in the first place.
