Symlinks are silently published as regular files

[kornelski]

I've got an opposite problem of #2748 — in my package I needed a symlink for a test, but the symlink silently became a regular file in the copy obtained from crates.io.

I'd prefer the symlink to stay as a symlink, at least on non-Windows. Or an error/big warning during publishing that the symlink has been replaced.

[da-x]

Please note that some packages currently rely on this behavior. Example: https://github.com/serde-rs/serde/tree/bb99b31eb0a55393101f9c80cd959b3a739ad70f/serde (symlinks in the serde repo).

[kornelski]

I think a nice compromise would be to keep symlink if it points to a file within the package, and copy if the symlink points to outside of the package (like the often used ../README symlink).

But given how annoying Windows is with its semi-support for symlinks, I probably have to resign to symlinks being lost.