zipfile and soft links

[Jim]

Hello,

I'm trying to unzip archives  that have soft links in them (that is,
were created on unix with a -y option).  I'm not finding that ZipFile
will do that.  That I can see, it creates the link file, and that file
has the right contents, but it is not a soft link in the directory
structure.  (I've both tested it interactively and looked at the
zipfile.py source, and didn't see the behaviour in either place.)

If I have that wrong, I'd greatly appreciate it if some kind soul could
correct me.

If it does not do soft links, I wonder if someone has tried patching
it?  That I can see the specs are on the web, at
ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/doc/appnote-iz-latest.zip , so I
wondered if someone who is a better programmer than I (not hard!) had
already done it.  The alternative is to shell out, which happens to be
quite involved in the context that I am using (e.g., what if the soft
link is to '/bin/ls' ?).

Thanks,
Jim Hefferon