[drbig]

As a sysadmin I'm very familiar with `makepkg`, its config file and the fact that sooner or later one will need both `clang` and `gcc`, because they're equivalent only in theory ;-)

But as I maintain only a library of pre-build(-once) software, rather than being an actual package maintainer - surely there is the whole other side that I normally do not see, much less touch.

Having said that, I'm all for better tooling - it's just that the project doesn't even hint, much less describe, the actual benefits for the people who will (sooner or later? have to?) use it.

And, unfortunately, I've been doing this for long enough to approach _any_ increase in complexity with at least anxiety, if not outright sadness (at "you could have spent that time/money on more _useful_ work", usually).

[imtringued]

They created a specification for the PKGBUILD format and a library to parse PKGBUILD files.

If you wanted to use PKGBUILD files to build Ubuntu or Debian packages, you could in principle build your own makepkg implementation for building Ubuntu packages.

You could also build an SBOM tool that takes a PKGBUILD and produces the SBOM using the PKGBUILD metadata of all the transitive dependencies.

They are also working on something that could be summarised as "IDE" features. Validation and linting of PKGBUILD files not unlike what a language server/IDE does (e.g. rust analyzer or IntelliJ).

EDIT:

There is also a library for programmatic creation of PKGBUILD files, so build systems could integrate with it to automatically produce Arch Linux packages. This could make building your own Arch Linux packages even easier than it already is.

[pwdisswordfishy]

Aren’t PKGBUILDs just shell scripts?