God, I hope that Google Drive doesn't start following symlinks. That behavior of Dropbox is completely broken and dangerous, and furthermore makes it impossible to use symbolic links for what they're supposed to be used for.
When symlinks are synced, they should be copied "opaquely", not "transparently". I.e., the link itself should be synced, not what the link points to. Opaque syncing of symlinks is the standard way to sync symlinks on Unix, and is what 30 years of experience with symlinks has taught us. Forgetting this painful lesson of history would be tragic.
Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other means? I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced any unexpected behavior.
> Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other means?
As others have mentioned, do the symlinks in the other direction. Or lobby Google to provide explicit configuration for syncing multiple folders.
> I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced any unexpected behavior.
It's anything but elegant! What happens, for instance if you drag and drop a folder into your synced folder, and unbeknownst to you this folder has a symlink in it to the root directory of the computer? Nothing good can happen, I assure you, if symlinks are synced transparently!
Additionally, I already heavily use symlinks for their intended purpose. E.g., I have lots of symlinks between files and folders to make it easier for me to find and navigate all my stuff. What happens if I want to have my folder "my-lifes-work", which is already a twisty maze of files, folders, and symlinks, and I want it synced between all my computers? If symlinks are synced opaquely, no problem: I just drop this into the synced folder, and everything is golden. If I drop this into a folder where links are synced transparently, who knows what hellish things result.
Maybe you think that Google shouldn't give a rat's ass about the needs of fellows such as myself, since I'm not in the mainstream, but symlinks were invented for people such as me. Not for programs to hijack for completely different purposes.
I actually did drop "my-lifes-work" into my Windows Live Mesh folder. Live Mesh is a lot like Dropbox and Google Drive. This actually works fine because Live Mesh ignores the symlinks. I.e., if A is my original computer which has the symlinks, and B is my second computer which didn't have "my-lifes-work" on before now, then after syncing, B ends up with everything that A has, only without the symlinks. This is okay for me, since I wrote a program to sync the symlinks out of band. This is less that ideal, but it's better than nothing.
Oh, for the day, when stuff such as this will just work the way that the gods intended it to!
When symlinks are synced, they should be copied "opaquely", not "transparently". I.e., the link itself should be synced, not what the link points to. Opaque syncing of symlinks is the standard way to sync symlinks on Unix, and is what 30 years of experience with symlinks has taught us. Forgetting this painful lesson of history would be tragic.