and one could change line 69 of /usr/share/vim/syntax/PKGBUILD.vim to include 'any' keyword also
that's for vim package

this must apply too to the vim package in [testing] too.

PKGBUILD.vim is in pacman source / pacman package as well.

But I don't know... There is no specific arch handling done in the whole pacman source. You can use whatever arch you want.

The arch limitations are in the arch specific side, db tools, etc.. Nothing was done in the pacman source for handling the any arch.
Afaik, it was all done in dbscripts : http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=dbscripts.git;a=summary

Based on this, maybe we should remove arch checking from PKGBUILD.vim as well, I don't know..

I'm a bit confused here.... Is PKGBUILD.vim file in the vim package at all? I only see it in pacman-contrib. Anyway, adding "any" to the list of know arches to be highlighted is fine.

Currently the man page looks like:
arch (array)
Defines on which architectures the given package is available (e.g.
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')).

Does adding this at the end sound fine?:
Packages that contain no architecture specific files may use arch=('any').

But this is very Archlinux specific.

makepkg just writes the arch inside .PKGINFO, repo-add in desc, but pacman does not do anything with it.

Maybe in the future, pacman could check that the arch matches a configuration in pacman.conf, but it is still not pacman which gives sense to the 'any' arch.
This choice is left to the distribution using it. For instance, Arch gives the sense of 'any' in dbscripts.

I do not see this as Arch specific. It is a feature of PKGBUILDs that makepkg handles.

oops sorry.i did not do my home work.
/usr/share/vim/syntax/PKGBUILD.vim is in pacman-contrib only

So the situation has changed; this is now a special value for pacman and makepkg:

$ grep -RFI '"any"' *
lib/libalpm/trans.c: if(strcmp(pkgarch,arch) && strcmp(pkgarch,"any")) {

$ grep -RFI "'any'" *
NEWS: - arch=('any') support ( FS#8153 )
contrib/updatesync: if [ "$arch" = 'any' ]; then
contrib/updatesync: CARCH='any'
contrib/gensync: if [ "$arch" = 'any' ]; then
contrib/gensync: CARCH='any'
doc/pacman.conf.5.txt: architecture 'any' can always be installed, as they are meant to be
pactest/tests/upgrade084.py:self.description = "Install a package ('any' architecture)"
pactest/tests/upgrade084.py:p.arch = 'any'
scripts/makepkg.sh.in: if [ "$arch" = 'any' ]; then
scripts/makepkg.sh.in: CARCH='any'
scripts/makepkg: if [ "$arch" = 'any' ]; then
scripts/makepkg: CARCH='any'

Actually, I was wrong. I did not realize how makepkg handled the CARCH/arch stuff.

Then I completely agree with the change Allan suggested for PKGBUILD man page.

And we also need to fix PKGBUILD.vim

patch on maint-working