I still think removing pipestatus for no reason at this point is simply superfluous.
The patch should IMHO at least test for pipestatus's presence, and issue an appropriate error message (with instructions how to fix this) if it doesn't exist; though quite late in the upgrade process, i.e. after all updated packages have been downloaded, of course.
P.S.: We could even attempt to download it (with e.g. curl or wget) from the script. Or install the root repository "manually" in advance on upgrading, of course from the updated spkg/install, since the other scripts are those of the old version.
