When asking this kind of question, please always state the OS and Gradle version.

No problem! We are using gradle-1.0-milestone-6 on CenOS 5.7. Is there an option to tell gradle not to follow the links like the 'followsymlinks' attribute does for ant? If not, what would you suggest for a workaround?

There is currently no such option. The usual workaround is to use the Ant task.

Unfortunately, the ant task does not support symlinks, too. Is there any other workaround besides using native tar implementations?

Considering that Java7 have support for symbolic links what is the prospect of resolving that matter so that it at least works with the latest version of Java?

Internally, Gradle already has sophisticated symlink support, using NIO2 where appropriate. This story hasn't bubbled up yet, but I'll export it to JIRA so that it gets some attention.

We do intend to fix this, it's just a matter of priorities. Would you be interested in helping to fix this?

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

We intend to prioritize issues that are actionable and impactful while working more closely with the community. Many of our JIRA issues are inactionable or irrelevant. We would like to request your help to ensure we can appropriately prioritize JIRA issues you’ve contributed to.

Please confirm that you still advocate for your JIRA issue before December 10th, 2016 by:

• Checking that your issues contain requisite context, impact, behaviors, and examples as described in our published guidelines.
• Leave a comment on the JIRA issue or open a new GitHub issue confirming that the above is complete.

We look forward to collaborating with you more closely on GitHub. Thank you for your contribution to Gradle!

Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.