> I got curious and looked at what it would take to support both the old
> and new structure sizes, and the diff below appears to work fine.  The
> issue is more of a problem on slower architectures where kernel and
> packages can stay unsynchronized for a longer time.  Thoughts?

I really don't believe in that 'support model'.  The people using those
machines build their own packages (or they don't, but that's not our
problem).