Upgrading to the last libarchive fixed some problems, but also caused a new one : http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7484 I tried to look at it, since Dan was away, but miserably failed. I'm afraid this one is way too hard for me, I found all libarchive related stuff very confusing, and couldn't make any sense of it. All that is left is even more questions. Sorry about that :( Maybe I'll keep trying, if we can take the time to fix this, and if no one else can figure it out. The main questions I've (already in the bug comments) are : 1) why pacman got permission of /tmp wrong with old libarchive, while old bsdtar gets them right? 2) is the ARCHIVE_EXTRACT_NO_OVERWRITE option the only way in libarchive to avoid losing symlinks ? And does this option do what we want? I'm afraid both questions require some investigations for being answered.