So the reason why the symlinks are there is because they could be pointing to directories and then if you had a file extracted in there, you'd get not found if you'd skip the symlink. Like consider
/usr/share/doc/foo/bar as a symlink to /usr/share/foo/bar
and another package installs a file into /usr/share/doc/foo/bar/ rather than the canonical location.
This is documented in the dpkg manual page and tracked upstream in
So the reason why the symlinks are there is because they could be pointing to directories and then if you had a file extracted in there, you'd get not found if you'd skip the symlink. Like consider
/usr/share/ doc/foo/ bar as a symlink to /usr/share/foo/bar
and another package installs a file into /usr/share/ doc/foo/ bar/ rather than the canonical location.
This is documented in the dpkg manual page and tracked upstream in
https:/ /bugs.debian. org/cgi- bin/bugreport. cgi?bug= 859646
dpkg -V is tracked upstream in https:/ /bugs.debian. org/cgi- bin/bugreport. cgi?bug= 975338