rclone lets folders with symbolic links be synchronized with cloud providers that do not support symbolic links by translating them to special text files containing the destination the link points to while on flight to the cloud, and then back to symbolic links while on flight from the cloud. The behavior is activated with the --links option. These special files have names formed from the name of the link with the .rclonelink extension and contain just the link destination.
Interestingly, rclone is not the only program using this kind of approach. As an example, there is a special fuse overlay filesystem called nlinkfs that performs exactly the same operation.
The problem here is that every application using the approach has its own opinion on how the files representing the symbolic links should be named and internally arranged and all of them are incompatible. It would be nice if rclone could provide a few different styles (e.g., via a --links-style option). I am thinking about:
--link-style=rclone (default), i.e. the current behavior
--link-style=nlinkfs, i.e. the nlinkfs style: links have the .LNK extension and prepend a special signature to the link destination.
possibly others.
This would favor interoperability. Usage case: you started using some cloud provider with a dedicated sync client not supporting symlinks. Because you needed them, you used nlinkfs as a translation layer. Then you learn about rclone and you want to use it, but rclone cannot deal with the .LNK files that are already in the cloud.
I've not heard of nlinkfs before. Are there other programs like that?
A --links-style would be implemented in the local backend. It would be relatively easy to do, but I'm unsure of whether it would be of general interest enough?
As another example I can think of cygwin that simulates POSIX-compliant symbolic links in the Microsoft Windows file system by creating (special) Windows shortcuts (.lnk files) with additional information used (by Cygwin) at the time of symlink resolution. Cygwin "symlinks" are quite interesting because they can be "interpreted" as posix symbolic links by cygwin and at the same time they are valid windows shortcuts. So, --link-style=cygwin could be another interesting option, possibly slightly more complicated to implement.
To me the interest in this option is to facilitate migration to rclone. Sample case: Mr. A starts working with OneDrive using the excellent onedrive client for linux by abraunegg. Because that client has no trick to deal with symlinks, nlinkfs is used as a translation layer. Namely, Mr. A has "Folder-nolinks" mounted to "Folder" where he normally works. Then he synchronizes "Folder-nolinks" to OneDrive. At some point Mr. A decides he would like to use rclone instead, because it makes it easier to move things around to other clouds (and now it also supports bisync). The remote is full of .LNK files that rclone cannot currently understand, though.
Sorry to post again, without any actual news about the problem.
Being new to rclone and its forum and bug tracker, it is unclear to me if I should I open a feature request on the bug tracker, or if it is enough to have it reported here. I suspect this is the case, as a courtesy to other users who might look for the feature and will avoid double posting if they find the wishlist on the tracker.
Thanks in advance for hinting at the correct action.