pacman packages fail to install

[de-vri-es]

Currently, pacman dies on packages from the cloudabi-ports repository.

First it successfully finishes package verification (or appears to, anyway), and then it says:

failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package)

This is probably because the packages in the ports repository aren't build with makepkg but put together manually. While it's probably a bug with pacman that the error message is so unclear, there's probably a change in the package format that needs to be implemented here as well.

[m-ou-se]

With a newer version of pacman, the error is:

error: failed to commit transaction (wrong or NULL argument passed)

This happens for any update which contains a cloudabi package, but it doesn't specifically say that the cloudabi package is the problem. (It is, but had to find that out by binary search.)

[de-vri-es]

A bit of stracing so far seems to indicate pacman isn't event downloading the new package, which is kinda odd.