Binary package hint: nautilus
on hardy up to date as of 20080224 emptying trash follows symlinks.
sam@oberon:~$ mkdir test
sam@oberon:~$ cd test/
sam@oberon:~/test$ mkdir a b
sam@oberon:~/test$ touch a/foo
sam@oberon:~/test$ touch a/bar
sam@oberon:~/test$ touch a/baz
sam@oberon:~/test$ ln -s /home/sam/test/a/ b/link
sam@oberon:~/test$ ls -l a
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 sam sam 0 2008-02-24 13:59 bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 sam sam 0 2008-02-24 13:59 baz
-rw-r--r-- 1 sam sam 0 2008-02-24 13:59 foo
sam@oberon:~/test$ ls -l b
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 sam sam 17 2008-02-24 14:00 link -> /home/sam/test/a/
sam@oberon:~/test$ nautilus .
sam@oberon:~/test$ #move b to trash
sam@oberon:~/test$ #empty trash
sam@oberon:~/test$ ls a
sam@oberon:~/test$ ls -a a
. ..
needs to be an absolute (not relative) symlink
this is unexpected and can lead to data loss
A similar bug existed before Bug #188361 , Sebastien Bacher ask me to open a new bug, rather than reopen the old one.
Thank you for your bug report. Using the steps you describe doesn't lead to the bug on my hardy installation and upstream says it works correctly for him too. Do you use a standard local configuration or nfs or something which could make nautilus behaves differently?