[arch-general] misleading pacman errors when upgrade fails

[Carl Schaefer]

I just tried to upgrade three packages, including core/filesystem, and
saw these errors:

 filesystem-2014.05-...     8.7 KiB  4.23M/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
 e2fsprogs-1.42.10-1...   691.8 KiB  1305K/s 00:01 [######################] 100%
 cups-filters-1.0.54...   648.6 KiB  2033K/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
(3/3) checking keys in keyring                     [######################] 100%
(3/3) checking package integrity                   [######################] 100%
(3/3) loading package files                        [######################] 100%
(3/3) checking for file conflicts                  [######################] 100%
(3/3) checking available disk space                [######################] 100%
(1/3) upgrading cups-filters                       [######################] 100%
(2/3) upgrading filesystem                         [######################] 100%
warning: /etc/passwd installed as /etc/passwd.pacnew
warning: /etc/group installed as /etc/group.pacnew
error: extract: not overwriting dir with file /usr/local/share/man
error: problem occurred while upgrading filesystem
error: could not commit transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

The failure was apparently caused by /usr/local/share/man being a real
directory on my system, when the "filesystem" package wants it to be a
symlink to "../man".  I imagine pacman could check in advance for this
sort of extraction problem for all packages before upgrading or
installing any packages, which could be part of the existing "checking
for file conflicts" phase.

Also, the error messages about the transaction being aborted and no
packages being upgraded are wrong.  The upgrade of "cups-filters" was
successful, and "filesystem" appears to have been upgraded too.  The
only upgrade that was aborted was "e2fsprogs" that pacman hadn't
started.

Is any of this worth reporting as bugs or enhancements?
Carl