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> Dropbox’s magic symlink following has always been the anti-pattern

Uh, what?

Following symlinks is the default behavior for unix programs that requires extra effort to work around, why would it be "magic", or an antipattern?

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Dropbox was replacing symlinks with the target file or directory tree in synced copies. This obviously breaks legitimate symlinks since the whole point of having the symlink is to have a reference to the target, not another copy of the target.

It’s really simple: symlinks are symlinks and should be synced as symlinks. Now they are.

In the context of file archival and synchronization.

Just like how when you tar up a directory, the symlinks are stored as symlinks, not as the files they point to.

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