Yesterday J.H. said:
The problem stemmed from mainly bad luck - looks like I was the only one to make it into the mirror right at that moment (before the rsync was turned off) and got a screwed up sync (they were in the process of fixing something)
So more or less - my bad luck nothing to be concerned with.
It was more than that. I saw it too Sunday. And had to quickly hardlink everything back into position. The magic of keeping a hardlinked shadow copy.
Even though rsync went on a delete frenzy, I brought the content back online without too much repeat download nonsense. Something was amuck at kernel.org for sure; but they got it squared away eventually.
../C