Symbolic link usage with repo-add/remove
When using repo-add and repo-remove the repo.db and repo.files files are made into symlinks. Replacing the symlinks with hardlinks is undone the next time repo-add is used.
This results in
-> could not open file /var/lib/pacman/sync/repo.db: Unrecognized archive format
when a custom local repository is hosted outside of the local machine.