By default, MacOS X HFS+ volumes are case-insensitive, so the symlink from Thunar to thunar fails with a 'Thunar and thunar are the same file' error (or something similar; lost the terminal output). I imagine Terminal also has this issue. Would it be OK to just ignore it if the symlink creation fails? Right now I see a check for PLATFORM_WIN32, but ignoring the failure would fix the problem for any case-insensitive FS, regardless of platform. I just ran into this because my latest xfce4svn script does a DESTDIR install inside srcdir to keep a record of files installed so they can be uninstalled on the next update. This fails for me because I have my src/ directory in $HOME, which is on an HFS+ volume that I share between MacOS and Linux.
Created attachment 853 ignore symlink creation failure patch
Fixed with revision 23763. 2006-11-06 Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org> * configure.in.in, thunar/Makefile.am: Fix installation on case insensitive file systems. Bug #2521.