tar and symlinks

["Charles S. Wilson" <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

I just noticed something with my recent ncurses-5.2-5 update.  When I
did the "make install prefix=/tmp/usr" step, /tmp/usr/man/man3/*
contained a lot of symbolic links.  Since I did this under cygwin-1.3.1
without the "useoldsymlinks" switch (whatever it is), these symbolic
links were the "new" kind; Windows understood them.

However, after I created the tarball & ran setup on it to actually
install the new ncurses on my system prior to uploading it, I discoved
that the symlinks in /usr/man/man3 thus created were OLD style.

To eliminate setup.exe as the culprit, I then just untarred the tarball
in yet another tmp location, and sure enough, the untarred
/tmp2/usr/man/man3/ symlinks were OLD style.  So TAR is the culprit.

I know that tar archives store symlinks info in the directory entry and
doesn't actually copy the "files" themselves.  So, when untarring tar
basically says, "Whoa, I've got a symlink here.  Let me run "ln -s
foo-orig foo-link" (okay, it calls the kernel function to do it, it
doesn't actually exec a new process).

But why is the link OLD style?  Is this behavior by design, or is it a
bug?

--Chuck

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