No UNC paths in Linux? Seriously...?

[jochen_b]

Okay, so I installed FreeFileSync (7.4 on Linux Mint 17.2 from the GetDeb PPA since you're not supporting Ubuntu-based LTS releases) in Linux to stick to what I've been using so far on Windows (slowly bidding Windows "farewell" as Microsoft's computer sabotage attempts to make everyone and their dog to downgrade to Windows 10 slowly starts to really get onto one's nerves biggest-time) and ... What? I cannot input a UNC Path (i.e. \\SMBHOST\SMBSHARE\Folder) into neither the Source nor Target field? In 2015? Seriously?

Come on, even Nemo/Nautilus supports smb://SMBHOST/SMBSHARE/Folder - even the Windows version accepts UNC paths (\\SMBHOST\SMBSHARE\Folder) in the Source or Target input field.

Well, that just rendered FreeFileSync on Linux completely useless for me. Mounting a SMB/CIFS share (in the likes of the SFTP example from the manual) to a mountpoint so that FreeFileSync can have "access" to it is a totally messed up way since "mount/mount.smbfs/mount.cifs" doesn't let you mount crap as a user (yes, I am well aware of "sudo mount"ing it from the commandline before running FreeFileSync, but that's way above and beyond "convenient") - and we well better don't even talk about the highly idiotic location to where "gvfs" does mount network shares from within Nemo/Nautilus.

To cut to the meat of it: I strongly suggest you at least support basic stuff like SMB/SSH/SFTP directly from within FreeFileSync given the requisite fuse-fs package is installed ("samba-client" and/or "fuse-cifs" should actually be a default on almost all popular distro nowadays) - or use gvfs like Nemo/Nautilus does (though that's not really a prime example of a meaningful implementation it at least supports SMB, SSH/SFTP, FTP(S)). Mount it for comparison/syncing and then dismount when the operation is done.

Off now trying to get "SuperFlexibleFileSynchronizer" working ... that thing can actually handle SMB (along other protocols) by itself, although being somewhat "ancient" now.

EDIT: Oh, great ... so SourceForge doesn't display double-backslashes in a post correctly... oh well ... *facepalm*

*Walks away mumbling something about "OpenSource Software" and "half-assed"*