Comment 5 for bug 1639863

The appstream-generator (https://github.com/ximion/appstream-generator) uses the 'md5sums' file present in .deb archives to retrieve the list of contents, and this file doesn't contain information for symlinks - that's why the icon can't be found. It does that for speed, since reading the contents from the actual data.tar.gz/xz would require reading the entire file and that would be too slow.

So the patch to read the symlink would be technically easy, but I don't think it would be accepted.