Bug#1139000: destroys symlinks

[Rene Engelhard]

Package: strip-nondeterminism
Version: 1.14.1-2
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: rene at debian.org

Hi,

While working on https://people.debian.org/~rene/manual-strip-nondeterminism.diff
(without the -f...) I noticed this:

$ ls empty.zip 
empty.zip
$ ls -l empty.zip 
-rw-r--r-- 1 rene rene 22 10. Aug 2023  empty.zip
$ ln -sf empty.zip test.zip
$ ls -l *.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 rene rene 22 10. Aug 2023  empty.zip
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rene rene  9  6. Jun 13:05 test.zip -> empty.zip
$ for i in `find . -name "*.zip"`; do strip-nondeterminism -t zip $i; done
Normalized ./empty.zip
Normalized ./test.zip

(so simulate how it'd be ran automatically for all .zips anywhere)

$ ls -l *.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 rene rene 22  6. Jun 13:07 empty.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 rene rene 22  6. Jun 13:07 test.zip

Now the symlink is gone and we have two identical files.

This is bad.

There are symlinks for a reason :) (e.g. /usr/lib/something to
/usr/share/something for policy for arch-indep files.)

Still happens on sid where i noticed.

I think it should either ignore symlinks or follow them (in the above
case either would have worked, if following the second call then would have
nothing to normalize)

Regards,

Rene