[arch-general] pacman question - missing files (repost)

[Genes Lists]

(Reposting in plain text - so sorry - been using thunderbird which
automatically does that for mail lists - now with it's impending demise
I am trying other mailers - like evolution ... )

I've seen this behavior a couple of times now. Here's what happened
today.

After installing systemd and libsystemd 230-4 (updating from 230-3). No errors reported.
However computer refused to boot properly. Booting recovery and examining the logs showed that libsystemd.so was missing - complaint by udev.

/usr/lib/libsystemd.so was present as a link pointing to libsystemd.so.0.15.0 which was absent.
running pacman -Qk libsystemd
confirmed the problem file.
reinstalling libsystemd from cache - in recovery chroot - gave a warning about the link and the the libraryfile 
something like - warning: could not get file information for /usr/lib/libsystemd.so and .same for .so.0.15.0
And indeed the file was still absent. 

from same cachea rea I  installed libsystemd and systemd 230-3 (i.e. downgrading) - this worked and the library is back now and I could boot with udev dying a squirrely death.

I have had same problem (missing files with no warnings) with other updates - last time was glibc - that was fun to fix ... konsole wont start without glibc 

There were other less impactful ones in recent months  - about time pacman 5 moved to testing - not saying its pacman itself - but something is amiss - 
could be hardware, kernel or ?? I have no errors in the log files. and do not see any issues from smartctl either.

In all cases pacman -Qk finds the problem - and in all cases there were no errors reported on initial install -and there were similar warnings as zbove on re-install of same package from cache file.

In every case there was a shared library with a sym link - and the actual library file was missing.

Any suggestions for tracking this down? I assume if the package file was corrupted pacman would complain and redownload - so I'm a bit stumped ... 

thanks for any guidance.

gene