I did not understand 90% of what Ali H. Caliskan said, and I cannot understand how someone can keep top-posting after 3 different people asked him to comply to the bottom-posting rule, but well... I just wanted to say that the example he gave reminded me of frugalware's handling of split packages : http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-June/006778.html I am sorry I did not realize that 1 year earlier, but I much prefer their solution (or probably a mix between both), because it allows easy parsing of pkgbuilds using bash. The current format is quite hard (and inefficient) to parse : http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=dbscripts.git;a=commitdiff;h=d455a0b2cd72cd... However the current format looks much nicer and readable, and this might be a more important aspect. And more importantly, it's already in use and working :)