The .e there is absolutely correct as depending on the repository format version $lookup may be a file or directory. We switched to a directory with version 1. So the .f will fail on a current repo version which explains the failure in install-core-dist.pl
The real question is not why $lookup ends up being a directory (that's the normal case) but why we don't detect that we are dealing with a version 2 repo. The PKGBUILD script posted on https://github.com/ugexe/zef/issues/190 gives the answer to that: rm -f "$pkgdir/usr/share/perl6/vendor/version" Of course, by deleting that file, you rob rakudo of a vital piece of information. Without that it runs on the wrong assumption that it's dealing with a version 0 repository and that $lookup must be a file. There's really nothing we could or should do here. As much as I'd like us to throw a more useful error message here, that's simply not possible without slowing down all normal uses. And trying to make rakudo resilient against random files missing sounds like an uphill battle. Please just remove the offending lines from the script. This, too looks highly suspicious: msg2 'Removing redundant precomp file dependencies...' _precomp=($(pacman -Qqg perl6 | grep -v zef | pacman -Qql - | grep -E 'dist|precomp' || true)) for _pc in "${_precomp[@]}"; do [[ -f "$pkgdir/$_pc" ]] && rm -f "$pkgdir/$_pc" done Considering that the spec file for openSUSE does not delete anything, I suggest starting with an absolute minimum of a build script. The install-dist.pl call may be quite sufficient. openSUSE does have quite strict packaging guidelines, too. https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/devel:languages:perl6/perl6-Inline-Perl5/perl6-Inline-Perl5.spec?expand=1
