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Build 20021119 You have to specify IResource.DEEP to copy the underlying contents of linked resources. Existing clients that are not aware of linked resources will be caught by this. I think the default should be to copy the underlying contents of linked resources, and IResource.SHALOW would allow clients that are aware of linked resources to only copy the link.
The expected behaviour on link copy is a shallow copy. When you copy a windows shortcut or a unix symbolic link, it will perform a shallow copy. Copying underlying contents is not usually supported. That's why we want shallow copy to be the default behaviour, and DEEP requires an extra flag. Generally, if the user tries to copy linked resources into a place where linked resources are not permitted, we want them to get back an error, ("Linked resources must be direct children of a project"). In general, people are using linked resources because they have a requirement that their resources remain in that particular location, so unexpectedly changing location (deep copy) is not generally what they want. Only in certain special cases should a deep copy happen "for free" (copying resources to java output folder being the prime example). Are there other cases in the java model where you think deep copy is necessary? Jim, any further comments on this?
My point was just that every single client of Platform/CORE (including the Java Builder and the Java Model) is going to have to adapt to this behavior, whereas an automatic deep copy would make it transparent. If the Workbench wants to have the same behavior as the Windows explorer, it will have to first make sure that linked resources render differently, then (if the default was a deep copy) it could use the SHALLOW flag.
Ok, the default is now a DEEP copy, and a new IResource.SHALLOW flag has been added to get the opposite effect. The DEEP flag has been deprecated, and will be removed after the next integration build. These changes have been released to the HEAD stream. This change does NOT make linked resources transparent for users of our API, but it will prevent CoreExceptions occurring for clients that are not yet aware of linked resources. Up to date clients will still need to revisit their uses of copy and move to decide if they need to do a shallow or deep copy/move. In most cases, the shallow version will make more sense (for example when copying/moving a project). Clients that have UI for copy/move will usually present the choice of shallow or deep to the user. End users will generally expect shallow copy/move to occur, as this is the behaviour of copying and moving linked files under most operating systems (shortcuts or symbolic links).
