[Scribus] symbolic links

[Frank Cox]

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.