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Dolphin and other KDE file managers should create relative symlinks instead of absolute (when dragging and dropping, I'm not talking about creating symlinks through dialog window).

Now every time I create symlink (or many symlinks) by dragging and dropping files, I must open terminal and use a command: symlinks -rc [directory when symlinks are placed]. This command (which has to be installed manually from repository, at least in Debian) fixes absolute symlinks by changing them to relative. Without any options (just "symlinks [directory]") this command shows various types of "bad" symlinks, like "other_fs", "dangling" etc.

Let's say we are in directory
/home/panlukasz/Documents/Books/Scientific Books/
and we have a file
/home/panlukasz/University/Courses/Numerical methods/Handbook.pdf
to which we would like to have a symlink in the first of localizations.
If we drag and drop this file to first localization (Scientific books), either using tabs, or split view or separate windows of Dolphin, the context menu will appear. If we choose to create symlink, Dolphin will create absolute symlink, which is annoying.

We would want to dual-boot two distributions of GNU/Linux. If we have separate partition for our personal data, perhaps we will want to mount it under different mountpoints, for example /home/ in the first distro, and /mnt/home/ in the second distro, in order to avoid conflicts between two distros writing configuration in the hidden files (in the second distro configuration will be written to /home/, but /home/ isn't a mountpoint to our personal data partition). If Dolphin creates absolute symlinks (/home/panlukasz/University/Courses/Numerical methods/Handbook.pdf) in the first distro, all symlinks read in the second distro are dangling, broken. If Dolphin created relative symlinks (../../../University/Courses/Numerical methods/Handbook.pdf), symlinks read in the second distro would work properly.

Please fix this behavior of Dolphin.

They should be able to create relative AND absolute symlinks. Absolute symlinks are very useful for developers and those who make shell scripts.

ivanthekdefan wrote:They should be able to create relative AND absolute symlinks. Absolute symlinks are very useful for developers and those who make shell scripts.

There should be a configuration option in Dolphin to choose between absolute and relative symlinks. Or this option should be included in context menu while dragging and dropping files.

I agree: it should be very useful!

Thanks for raising this issue for discussion.
Creating relative links manually is tedious but there are good reasons that absolute links are the default.
It would be good if KDE users had a choice but there are difficulties (e.g. relative to what?).
How could this work?
Perhaps a 'right mouse click' tool to convert absolute links to relative links in a specified directory tree may be practical.