Hello. There's an old bugreport in Debian about "symlink-eating" behavour of tar, which were considered unreproducible for quite some time -- http://bugs.debian.org/452365 .
Recently I managed to hit this bug too, and after some tries created a reproducer from my files. I attached the reproducer to that bugreport, see http://bugs.debian.org/452365#44 . The problem in short is that when extracting archive which contains hardlinked symlinks (several symlinnks hard-linked to each other), in some cases the result of extraction is not what it should be, and all these symlinks gets turned into zero-length, zero-permissions but correctly hardlinked regular files instead. The reproducer attached to the debian bugreport shows this issue. In there, the symlinks in question are in [ep]/etc/rc?.d/ -- these should be hardlinked to each other (it is from rsync --link-dest). I wanted to take a look at this issue myself to maybe produce a patch too, but unfortunately right now I don't have time to do that, also because I'm not familiar with tar source. But maybe this will be useful reproducer for someone more knowlegeable, before I'll be able to get to that myself. Thanks, /mjt
