Should mount --bind not follow symlinks?

[Anthony Heading <anthony@magix.com.sg>]

Hi,
    My automounted dirs have up till now been symlinks, where
e.g. /opt/perl defaults to automounting /export/opt/perl/LATEST
which is a symlink.

   This all worked OK until the 2.4(.2) automounter helpfully tries
to mount --bind /export/opt/perl/LATEST /opt/perl

   And this errors with "mount: wrong fs type, ..." because it
seems the first arg to mount --bind mustn't be a symlink,
resulting in a "No such file" or similar error being returned
to the requester.

   What is especially confusing is that if this whole thing
was kicked off with say  ls /opt/perl/bin,  the first attempt
returns "No such file or directory", but automount
then installs a symlink into /opt,  so a second ls attempt
works fine.

   Is this known about / to be expected?  I can't see why
one of automount or mount or the underlying system call
shouldn't chase symlinks, but I know I might be missing
some reason why I shouldn't be attempting this.

Anthony