Error while upgrading filesystem 0.8-9 - 2007.08-1

Question

Ran pacman -Syu today (as I do every day) and while it was upgrading the filesystem package I got the following output:
warning: extracting /etc/passwd as /etc/passwd.pacnew                           
warning: extracting /etc/fstab as /etc/fstab.pacnew                             
warning: extracting /etc/group as /etc/group.pacnew                             
warning: extracting /etc/shadow as /etc/shadow.pacnew                           
warning: extracting /etc/ld.so.conf as /etc/ld.so.conf.pacnew                   
error: could not extract /usr/var (Directory not empty)                         
error: errors occurred while upgrading filesystem                               
(1/4) upgrading filesystem                          [#####################] 100%
Should I be worried? To me it just looks like it was trying to create an already existing directory and bailed out. Looking at the filelist of filesystem reveals no files in that directroy so I don't think there is any problem, or is there?

Answer 1

While you wait for an update to pacman, you could do the following:
* uninstall any packages that have put files in /usr/var
* add the following line to /etc/fstab
/var /usr/var none bind 0 0
* mount /usr/var
* reinstall the packages from step 1.
Note that pacman will still give you errors when updating the filesystem package, something along the lines of "could not extract /usr/var, mountpoint busy", but this isn't anything to worry about.