ls -lF dereferences symbolic links - ?bug or feature?

[Eric J Haywiser]

Hi,
        I observed the following when an autofs/nfs mounted
filesystem which I had a symbolic link to was shutdown.

ls -lF *

imposes a large delay (waiting autofs/nfs timeout) while

ls -l *
ls -F *

both respond instantly.  Apparently ls -lF classifies
the link reference rather than the link itself,
while ls -F classfies the link.  This is not expected,
as the object being classified depends on the output format
of the listing.

It seems that either:

1) the link reference should only be classified  when one issues
        ls -lLF

2) ls should have an option to not follow symbolic links
   so that ls -lF --no-dereference will not impose delay
   when filesystems disappear while providing classification
   of files.

Thank you for your consideration of this report
and all the wonderful products of the GNU project.

-Eric Haywiser