jar always follows symbolic links and as far as I know there is
no option to prevent it from doing so. So if you have a symlink
in your filesystem like "lib -> .." you throw jar into an infinite
loop. When creating an archive on UNIX you almost never want to
follow symlinks.

By default tar does not follow symbolic links. Also zip provides a
way to not follow symlinks (-y).

I consider this a bug not an RFE since it is such a glaring omission.