I've seen (in the past) various packages on the AUR which jumped by 3 or 4 pkgrels in a very short period of time. Sometimes it happens like this:- 1. Maintainer changes something and breaks the package with pkgrel=2 2. Bug reported on comments. Maintainer reverts change and makes pkgrel=3 It can also happen like this:- 1. Maintainer makes changes to pkgdesc or cleans up some of the commands, depends, etc. sets pkgrel=2 For both of the cases above, is pkgrel updating really necessary? For the second one, I think not, as changing documentation doesn't (shouldn't) require recompilation of the package by its users. Similarly if depends changes, users who already have the package installed would already have the dep, so no reason for such users to upgrade? For the first case its a bit more tricky. My reasoning is that if the PKGBUILD breaks and can't be built at all, the maintainer could simply release with the same pkgrel. Noone would have been able to build pkgrel=2 in that example anyway, so why jump to pkgrel=3? The reason I bring this up is because there's no easy way (yet) to diff what's changed between versions of the package, and hence when I notice a pkgrel change I can't really check to see what has been changed and whether its worth recompiling the package (for larger packages like firefox4 this can be significant). Comments appreciated.