gdb follows symlinks when looking for debuginfo

[Olaf Hering]

Why does gdb follow symlinks when looking for debuginfo and executables?

The binaries in our installation images are symlinked into a
loop-mounted cramfs image, or to an extracted tree on a remote
filesystem.
The gdb binary itself is a symlink /usr/bin/gdb ->
/mounts/inst-sys/usr/bin/gdb. For some reason, gdb starts to look for
debuginfo in /mounts/inst-sys/usr/lib/debug instead of just
/usr/lib/debug. The same is true for the executable thats being
debugged.

How can this be turned off? I do not see a cmdline switch for that.