[Bug-tar] bad treatment of symlinks

[Andries E. Brouwer]

The past days I have been trying to rescue a few TB of data
from a flaky system that reboots every hour or so.

I found tar almost completely unusable.
Thought at first that I would use tar up to a crash,
see how far it got, and start from there again,
but as it turns out, tar treats symlinks specially
and copies them as mode 0 files, only to restore
the mode at the end.
This means that partial tar results are no good.

It would be nice if tar treated symlinks for just
what they are: small files that contain a filename,
and restored file and mode at the moment of extraction.

Andries