record: don't dereference symlinks while copying over stat data Previously, we could be calling os.utime or os.chflags (via shutil.copystat) on a symlink. These functions dereference symlinks, so this would have caused the timestamp of the target to be set. On a read-only or similarly weird filesystem, this might cause an exception to be raised. This is pretty hard to test because conjuring up a read-only filesystem for test purposes is non-trivial.