It could be worth a developer diff'ing: * pacman::makepkg.conf and devtools::makepkg-x86_64.conf * pacman::pacman.conf and devtools::pacman*.conf When trying to figure out my /etc/ vs /usr/share/devtools/ confusion with MAKEFLAGS, I saw these differ in more areas than I would have expected. I don't know if any of the differences matter in the end, but I think it's nice they almost match, and I think it would be nicer if they only differ in areas where they need to. They probably used to match better, and diverged in a few areas where they didn't need to. Some of the differences are certainly nitpicky. pacman just dropped "-fstack-protector-strong" since it's enabled by default. https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54736 Others might matter in some situations, like different options on DLAGENTS. (I'm assuming it's right to have file:// missing from devtools, talkinga bout the curl options.) devtools gives package options "!optipng !upx". devtools has a different comment for XferCommand and IgnorePkg. Stuff like that.