Invalid package file format

[Alex]

Am Donnerstag, 10. August 2006 17:12 schrieb Alex:
> error: Invalid package file format. Invalid header found.

I have to reply to myself for some additional information.

The files in /var/lib/smart/channels/* looked a bit messy. 
So I did a bold 
rm /var/lib/smart/cache /var/lib/smart/channels/*
and, voila, it worked again - at least kind of.

It looks like the first time smart encounters a yast2 installation source in 
the list of channels during "update", the aforementioned "invalid package 
file format" appears. But only for this channel.

I had this reproducable (OK, at least two times) with the SUSE-Factory Non-OSS 
repository and the GURU RPM repository: The one of these two which came first 
in the update sequence got the error message - the other didn't. Hadn't the 
nerve to try this more often - the SUSE Factory channel takes hours to 
reload - so this might be a random coincidence.

Once the channel was messed up, however, it couldn't be brought back to live 
again except removing cache and channels.

Strange...