So... here is my "official" opinion on this. 1) Would I support adding this to makepkg/pacman? Yes. 2) Would I support Arch Linux using it in any way? No... But, I could be overridden on the second point if many Arch developers wanted to use it. I have two issues with this: Firstly, adding a build module will result in a level of expertise needed to understand what a PKGBUILD will do. At the moment, you can look at a PKGBUILD and see exactly what will be run to build that package. When I look at an ebuild, I can have a good guess at what is done, but given I have never used that system I am not always sure... Secondly, the advantage that you only need to update the extension file to update many packages is also its disadvantage. Which packages were built with the old prototype? I can now build from a PKGBUILD and get a different result to what I obtained when I first used it. Allan