Symbolic links are a widespread practice on linux to make a ressource (e.g. directory) available in another location without having to maintain several copies of it. This is implemented in many applications, e.g. having a ressources tree and a tree with user directories: Whenever a user is intended to work with a certain ressource, a symbolic link is placed into the directory he or she has access to. Given sufficient permissions, he or she can work with the ressource (create files in it) which may physically be written onto a different location, e.g. on a device with sufficient space. This works fine if the user accesses his home directory using Samba.
However, there are good reasons to work with WebDAV instead, port issues are one of them. The problem when porting such an application to WebDAV: Apache’s mod_dav is written in a way symbolic links are not exposed, no matter wether FollowSymLinks is set. This behaviour is intended by the communtiy, therefore a bug report was never tackled.
However, how can the desired behavior be ported to WebDAV? I tried to use hard links instead, but hard linking a directory seems not to work at all. Using mount
might work, but I cannot estimate the side effect of hundreds of mounts. Is there an option I didn’t come over by now? Is there a known “best practice”? Or does WebDAV simply not fit as a replacement for Samba?