File Roller cannot re-author APK archives

[Cefn]

I have an APK (an archive which contains an Android application) which I created using the standard Android Developer Tools. It opens fine and I can extract the contents, but I have real problems, and unusual errors, when trying to add or modify contents.

Every attempt I make to add either a folder or a file to the archive causes the popup error...
"An error occurred while adding files to the archive."
...whilst file-roller reports to Standard Error...
** (file-roller:1801): WARNING **: Error making symbolic link: File exists

This also happens if I delete the target file or folder from the archive before trying to upload a new one.

I've been attempting to simply replace some of the files in the archive with more up-to-date ones, without having to rebuild the app from scratch with the dev tools (I don't have access to the source and tools right now). I only need to change one line in a html file, and replace four icons.

The tool should be capable of managing this archive, and indeed I found a workaround, which is to use the .cache/ mounting of the archive to rsync a load of changes into the folder structure. In my case it was...
sudo rsync --recursive ./res/drawable-* /home/cefn/.cache/.fr-LedBmX/res/
...a path which I figured out by opening a file with a text editor or image viewer, which then reveals the auto-generated path to this archive's temporarily mounted directories via the Save As dialog. Then file-roller helpfully asks if I want to synchronize the changes on disk with the archive. I say yes, and the archive is updated. However, this workaround is not really usable for most people.

N.B. at the time I was running file-roller with sudo as I wondered whether there was a permissions problem, but the same happens without sudo.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: file-roller 3.6.3-1ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-19.29-generic 3.8.8
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-19-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Apr 30 08:37:16 2013
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: file-roller
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.