I just noticed that the last ffmpeg package is much bigger than the old one (13MB vs 4MB). Looking more in depth in the two packages, it looks like it is all the static libraries which are much bigger now : -rw-r--r-- root/root 4838852 2007-12-05 03:43 usr/lib/libavcodec.a -rw-r--r-- root/root 20604500 2008-06-26 03:12 usr/lib/libavcodec.a Isn't this only because the new one is not stripped? Here is how it is detected by file : $ file -biz /usr/lib/libavcodec.a application/x-archive So could this be an old pacman 3.1 regression ? http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=721ceee1e2c9b1842... Maybe this code also needs to handle x-archive. $ file -iz /usr/lib/* | grep x-archive | wc -l 366 $ file -iz /usr/lib/*.a | grep x-archive | wc -l 366 $ file -iz /usr/lib/*.a | grep -v x-archive /usr/lib/libcurses.a: application/x-not-regular-file /usr/lib/libdts.a: application/x-not-regular-file /usr/lib/libieee.a: application/x-object /usr/lib/libmcheck.a: application/x-object /usr/lib/libpng.a: application/x-not-regular-file So a few .a files don't appear as x-archive, but apparently the big majority of them do, so maybe this is not a big problem.