tar restoring symlinks as zero length files

[George Herson]

When I restored my /sbin dir from tape as root with

$ tar xzvv sbin

all the symlinks in that dir where restored as zero length regular files (and 
did again on a retry) even though the symlinks' tagets exist and the tar archive 
knows what they are.

Example:
$ tar xzvv sbin
.
.
.
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2001-07-18 11:37:58 sbin/vregistry -> linuxconf

$ ls -l  /sbin/vreg*
----------    1 root     root            0 Feb  6 17:01 /sbin/vregistry


If the above is correct behavior, should this be noted at 
http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_node/tar_115.html#SEC110 ?

BTW, I searched for a tar faq on www.faqs.org.  Is that the right to look?

$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.19

thanks,
george