"Add a new method that will give you the new behavior"

That is the beauty of open source eh? That you can implement this yourself!

I feel like this is a good idea, because you can produce the symbolic-link checks needed to be sure that this would work in the special cases you forsee. Your new function could act as a preprocessor (wrapper) for canonpath, performing the checks for symbolic links as would be required, and then send your string on to canonpath and returns its results. There is no need to reproduce the work already done there...

I think this is a great idea! I am sure that the autor would accept such a patch, as it does not intefere with what is already there.