[arch-general] [dbscripts] What's needed to support overriding arch in split packages?

[Evangelos Foutras]

makepkg and devtools are already capable of building split packages
with different architectures. A particular case of interest is
foo-data split packages which usually are much bigger than their
arch-dependent counterparts. Currently, a separate PKGBUILD is
required to convert these data packages to be arch-independent, which
complicates maintenance needlessly.

I had a look at the db-update and db-function scripts, but the code is
hard to follow for someone new to it. Therefore, I'd like to ask for
opinions from people who've worked on them and have a general
knowledge of how they work and how this could be implemented. My idea
is to make a special case for arch-dependent PKGBUILDs, to allow for
arch=('any') split packages, without necessarily parsing the
package_foo-data function.

What do you think?