We use 2 stages in our plan. Each creates it's own artifact. The first one runs it's tasks and creates an artifact once it has finished successfully. This artifact is then used by the second plan (as Artifact dependency).

The first Stage's plan definition uses the copy pattern "htdocs/" (which is the same as "htdocs/**" in ant, which means "htdocs recursively"). This does not copy those "dead" symlinks. They are just missing when we have a look into that build-dir of the second stage.
Symlinks which resolve OK in build environment are also not exported as symlinks, but instead as files, containing the symlink's destination file's content, which also is not OK, since it alters what is exported as artifact, also.

Symlinks should be respected when building the artifacts as any normal files are. And not (silently) skipped.