I have noticed that the PKGBUILD's for the AUR packages that I maintain contain a lot of duplicate code. For example, license installation: install -D -m644 COPYING \ "$pkgname/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/COPYING" appears frequently. It would be useful to have a utility function instead: # pkg-license <license file> function pkg-license() { install -D -m644 "$1" "$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/$(basename $1)" } That would appear in package() as: pkg-license COPYING Other candidates are Python 2 shebang rewriting (pkg-py2rewrite), installing documentation (pkg-doc), Python setup.py calls (pkg-pyinst/pkg-py3inst), and patches (pkg-patch). Many other distros contain such functions. From what I've seen, the functions can help make packages more concise and less error prone. I will be taking a university course in open source software development over the summer. We need to pick a project to work on during the course. Would adding utility functions to makepkg/PKGBUILDs be acceptable to Arch? -Aaron DeVore