If the text of this report has been mangled, then please refer to the attached file.

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This issue was originally raised in the mailing list thread starting here:

https://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/plain/scripts/makepkg.sh.in?id=912ea363dec9038e9226a619364e16709720cac3

In `makepkg', specifically:

https://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/scripts/makepkg.sh.in

the following exist:

local provides_list=()
eval $(awk '/^[[:space:]]*provides=/,/\)/' "$BUILDFILE" | \
sed -e "s/provides=/provides_list+=/" -e "s/#.*//" -e 's/\\$//')
...
local backup_list=()
eval $(awk '/^[[:space:]]*backup=/,/\)/' "$BUILDFILE" | \
sed -e "s/backup=/backup_list+=/" -e "s/#.*//" -e 's/\\$//')
...
local optdepends_list=()
eval $(awk '/^[[:space:]]*optdepends=\(/,/\)[[:space:]]*(#.*)?$/' "$BUILDFILE" | \
sed -e "s/optdepends=/optdepends_list+=/" -e "s/#.*//" -e 's/\\$//')
...
local known kopt options_list
eval $(awk '/^[[:space:]]*options=/,/\)/' "$BUILDFILE" | \
sed -e "s/options=/options_list+=/" -e "s/#.*//" -e 's/\\$//')

Perhaps there are more.

As you can plainly see, this ruins the ability to include comments that use the `)' character, as in the following:

options=(
'!strip'
'!makeflags' # Apparently, there are issues with concurrency (`-j2', etc.)
)

As explicitly pointed out by contributor lolilolicon, it also ruins seemingly valid usages of the `#' character. For instance:

optdepends=('hashtag: A program that parses #hashtags')

Perhaps there are other ramifications.