Invalid package file format (FIXED!)

[Alex]

One more reply to myself - but maybe it helps others with the same problem:

The point of the problem was that SUSE seems to have silently switched the 
location of some repositories from .../SUSE_Factory/... 
to .../opensuse-10.2/... or something like that.

Instead of recognizing the "file not found"-type error message from the 
repository server, smart seems to have put this HTML error page (!) into its 
channel cache.

Obviously this gives the channel (as cached) an invalid format - but the 
question is, why didn't smart recognize from the beginning that it wasn't 
downloading a valid channel description but an error message from the 
server :-( .

Maybe if some dev reads this...