untarring kernel source, symlink gone

[Alexander List <alexlist@ees2.oulu.fi>]

Hi,

maybe I cannot see the forest because of the many trees, but when I untar
the latest Linux kernel tarball, it ignores my symlink, creating a
directory in it's place:

# ls -l
[...]
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     src             7 Oct 25 01:44 linux -> v2.4.13
-rw-r--r--    1 root     src      23111925 Oct 25 01:28 linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2
drwxr-sr-x    2 root     src          4096 Oct 25 01:34 v2.4.13
[...]
# tar --bzip2 -xf linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2
# ls -l
[...]
drwxr-xr-x   14 1046     gdm          4096 Oct 24 08:21 linux
-rw-r--r--    1 root     src      23111925 Oct 25 01:28 linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2
drwxr-sr-x    2 root     src          4096 Oct 25 01:34 v2.4.13
[...]

Is that how it should behave???

regards

Alex

PS: Please cc me directly, I'm not currently subscribed to debian-user.