Oops, this should have gone to the public list directly, so I'll repost it here: I saw this problem a while ago already, but didn't really investigate it. When building a package, you would often end up with non-world-readable /usr/man/manX directories. This happens whenever this code in makepkg is executed: # move /usr/share/man files to /usr/man if [ -d $startdir/pkg/usr/share/man ]; then cd "$startdir" mkdir -p pkg/usr/man cp -a pkg/usr/share/man/* pkg/usr/man/ rm -rf pkg/usr/share/man fi This can be reproduced easily: [09:29:39][thomas@artin shm]$ fakeroot bash-3.2# mkdir -p foo/ab bar bash-3.2# ls -al foo/ bar/ bar/: total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 40 Jul 12 09:29 . drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 100 Jul 12 09:29 .. foo/: total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 Jul 12 09:29 . drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 100 Jul 12 09:29 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 40 Jul 12 09:29 ab bash-3.2# cp -a foo/* bar/ bash-3.2# ls -al foo/ bar/ bar/: total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 Jul 12 09:29 . drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 100 Jul 12 09:29 .. drwx------ 2 root root 40 Jul 12 09:29 ab foo/: total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 Jul 12 09:29 . drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 100 Jul 12 09:29 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 40 Jul 12 09:29 ab bash-3.2# I can't find out exactly what's causing this, so if anyone has an idea, feel free to share it. This should definitely be fixed quickly, as it prevents me from updating several packages.