RPM artifacts related to ghost files

I looked at some file list inconsistencies in a custom tool and discovered several odd things related to ghost files. A few packages contain hard-linked files where some of the names have the ghost flag set, but others haven't. Probably the most prominent example is binutils-2.23.51.0.1-6.fc18.x86_64: -rwxr-xr-x (g) 7 root root 2908152 /usr/bin/ld -rwxr-xr-x () 7 root root 2908152 /usr/bin/ld.gold (The --qf output format is '[%{filemodes:perms} (%{fileflags:fflags}) %{fileinodes} %{fileusername} %{filegroupname} %{filesizes} %{filenames}\n]'.) Symlinks with ghost status are fairly common. Here's an example from util-linux-2.22.2-6.fc18.x86_64.rpm: lrwxrwxrwx (cmng) 1 root root 12 /etc/mtab (I'm attaching the full list for Fedora/18/i686.) The next thing is very odd. xulrunner-devel-21.0-4.fc18.x86_64 contains ghost files which are present in the CPIO archive: -rw-r--r-- (g) 3055 root root 490 /usr/lib64/xulrunner/js-gdb.pyc -rw-r--r-- (g) 3055 root root 490 /usr/lib64/xulrunner/js-gdb.pyo rpm2cpio | cpio -tv shows this: -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 0 May 21 15:32 ./usr/lib64/xulrunner/js-gdb.pyc -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 490 May 21 15:32 ./usr/lib64/xulrunner/js-gdb.pyo (Both files have the same inode number, so they are hard linked to each other.) -- Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team