Avoiding "Size mismatch" Errors When Upgrading Maemo 5 Scratchbox

I have just returned to developing Maemo application, and as usual when I come back to my Maemo scratchbox installation, I start off by upgrading the development environment. So I opened my scratchbox and issued the commands

fakeroot apt-get update
fakeroot apt-get dist-upgrade

Unfortunately this did not work for me this time because of some inconsistencies in the index files kept at the Maemo servers (I think). I kept getting these "Failed to fetch http://someurl Size mismatch" errors. An example:

...
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/4bc37c7c77ebe90177c050b805a8dc79/nokia-binaries/h/hildon-application-manager-l10n/hildon-application-manager-l10n-plpl_6.0+r7389+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/4bc37c7c77ebe90177c050b805a8dc79/nokia-binaries/h/hildon-application-manager-l10n/hildon-application-manager-l10n-ptpt_6.0+r7389+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/4bc37c7c77ebe90177c050b805a8dc79/nokia-binaries/h/hildon-application-manager-l10n/hildon-application-manager-l10n-ruru_6.0+r7389+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/4bc37c7c77ebe90177c050b805a8dc79/nokia-binaries/h/hildon-application-manager-l10n/hildon-application-manager-l10n-svse_6.0+r7389+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/4bc37c7c77ebe90177c050b805a8dc79/nokia-binaries/h/hildon-theme-alpha/hildon-theme-alpha_9.1+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/free/m/maemo-launcher/maemo-launcher_0.35-7+0m5_i386.deb  Size mismatch
Failed to fetch http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/free/m/maemo-launcher/maemo-launcher-dev_0.35-7+0m5_all.deb  Size mismatch
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

To avoid these errors I manually downloaded the packages involved and installed them with dpkg. To make this process easier I simply copied the error messages into a text file, removed the "Failed to fetch" prefix and the "Size mismatch" postfix from all lines using search/replace, and saved this as files.txt. Then I invoked the following commands from within my scratchbox targets:

cat files.txt | xargs wget
dpkg -i *.deb

And voila, it works ;-)