chown, reference files, and symlinks

[Alexander Necheff]

I discovered that when chown is executed as follows: `chown 
--no-dereference --reference=/some/file /another/file`
chown will still dereference /some/file if it is a symlink and source 
ownership from the referenced file instead of the named symlink. The man 
page did not mention this behavior though the info page does make it 
clear this is an intentional design decision.

I was curious if:

1. There was a technical reason for this?

2. There were any thoughts on having chown be able to source ownership 
from a symlink, perhaps through a different argument so as to preserve 
existing behavior?


Thanks,
Alex