207719 - Symlinked files behave poorly WRT relative URLs

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Networking: File, defect)

Description

[Jeremy Nickurak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20030521 Galeon/1.3.4 Debian/1.3.4.20030526-1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20030521 Galeon/1.3.4 Debian/1.3.4.20030526-1

Speaking in #gnome on irc.gimp.net an interesting problem came up. A user was
attempting to make a link to an html file in another directory on his nautilus
desktop, which would open the relevant file in Mozilla. While it was
straightforward to get the file to open in Mozilla, the file contained relative
references to images, which failed to load because Mozilla had opened the
symlink as if it were the file in question in the symlink's location.

A number of points have been made for and against nautilus dereferencing the
link itsely. Regardless, I wonder if mozilla shouldn't just dereference it
itself anyways? If a user created a symlink to a random index.html somewhere,
isn't it reasonable for them to expect that relative URLs in that file continue
to work? Conversly, is there any reason for someone to expect that a symlink to
an html file would have images and files in the directory of the symlink that
would fill in the gaps in relative references?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Andrew Schultz]

> isn't it reasonable for them to expect that relative URLs in that file 
> continue to work?

"do what I tell you to do, not what you think I mean"

> Conversly, is there any reason for someone to expect that a symlink to
> an html file would have images and files in the directory of the symlink that
> would fill in the gaps in relative references?

I might have a template html file that loads images/css/whatever from its
current location.  I doubt I would ever do that, but if I did, I would expect it
to work.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.