The advantage of symlinks is that an administrator could see how things are laid out from the command line.
One thing to keep in mind is that system administrators don't see symlinks as being informational -- they see them as the actual UI for the redirection in question. So their expectation is that they'll be able to move the actual directory around at will (as long as they update the symlink to match).
If symlinks are used, the rule of least surprise would mean that no information whatsoever about the physical location of a tablespace should be stored in the system catalogs. Otherwise their relationship with the information stored in the symlink is ambiguous.
mk
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