When a project uses the "clone workspace for SCM" feature to grab a workspace from another project, somewhere in that process all symlinks in the original workspace are replaced with COPIES of the files they are supposed to point to. These copies are then afflicted with JENKINS-8677, where their exec permissions are wiped out. I'm pretty sure this is related to the clone workspace plugin. When I look at the workspace the files are coming FROM, everything is fine. Then the workspace they end up in, in the job that clones them, shows this symlink issue.