After watching Allan's talk at SINFO, I remembered one big thing, when he mentioned certain projects moving away of shipping configuration files and preinstalling them directly to /etc and instead install the defaults to /usr/ and overriding them in a similar fashion to how systemd does it. So I asked about this in #archlinux-pacman and this bug report was pointed out to me [1]. Here are 2 ideas, tell me what you think. 1) Move everything to /usr/lib/pacman/ /usr/lib/pacman/gnupg/ /usr/lib/pacman/hooks/ (for later) /usr/lib/pacman/repos.d I am not sure how to order repos with this way, possibly with a priority directive or with just a ##-testing or whatever like modular directories. Or possibly use something like Before=community in community-testing so that it is checked before community... etc Leave pacman.conf and makepkg.conf in /etc but move them to /etc/pacman/ and remove repos from pacman.conf . Basically making it similar to how systemd's config files are setup 2) Move everything to /usr/lib/pacman , and make EVERYTHING possible to be split out. /usr/lib/pacman conf1.conf options stuff ... and config2.conf more options stuff ... community.repo ... this would depend on . Also, using the Before=community whenever a [repo] is defined 3) Some middle ground. In the end, I like seeing up with repo stuff looking like this whether you choose to put them in seperate files or not, making it so that repos can be organized besides just straight down the file. [Repo] Name=core Before=extra community SigLevel=PackageRequired Include=/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist [Repo] Name=testing Before=core Requires=core SigLevel=PackageRequired Include=/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist [Repo] Name=allanbrokeit Before=core SigLevel = Never Server = http://allanmcrae.com/$repo/$arch etc [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17690 Thanks, -- Daniel Wallace Archlinux Trusted User (gtmanfred) Georgia Institute of Technology