Comment 4 for bug 48444

I need to review David's patch, because it looks like it will also fix bug 32669.

Another possible fix is to do:
dirpath, basename = os.path.split(path)
os.path.join(os.path.normpath(dirname), basename)
Which should canonicalize the directory, without modifying the basename. Should be the same effect as manually traversing all but the last symlink.