Hello, I'm sorry for the confusion. A little research reveals that make automatically recognises the MAKEFLAGS environmental variable. (I didn't know it, and I used to add $MAKEFLAGS to each make invocation.) I agree that a change in makepkg.conf should reflect a change in the base-devel group. However, I think that a separate JOBS variable would be more appropiated, and would also work with other build systems if they eventually get support. $ grep JOBS /etc/makepkg.conf JOBS=4 MAKEFLAGS="-j $JOBS" $ grep make PKGBUILD make # No change here $ grep strange-build-system PKGBUILD strange --parallel=$JOBS Thanks, Kalrish P.S.: at least with community/mpv, it seems that Waf is able to bootstrap itself, so it's not necessary to install it to build the mentioned package.