I don't want to sound too harsh, but this patch looks quite complex for what it does, does not use gettext like every other options, and seems rather useless to me.
I don't really understand what you mean with gettext, as far as I know it's using it(although I maybe had skipped something) well, it's not only intended to be used with "safe" makepkg, look it this way, someone has -arch and -mute changed to his platform so the packages are optimized, the problem is that they won't work on other processor, if that person builds the package for a repo he will have to change makepkg.conf in this way he could do makepkg --config=release and it would source makepkg.release(witch obviously must have had created earlier), or maybe a specific makepkg for one package makepkg --config=python wich would use makepkg.python I know i't's a bit complicated, but otherwise it would source the file several times if there are more arguments(maybe there's some other way simpler to do it that I haven't noticed, anyway I'm still looking at the source to simplify it)