Arch Linux

Thanks smudge for the handy bash script!
I now removed pkgtools because whoneeds was the only tool I was using.

You're not the only one synthetic, happens here to. Have a look at:
https://github.com/Daenyth/pkgtools/issues/40

You could put a little function into your ~/.bashrc:

# whoneeds replacement via pactree
whoneeds() {
comm -12 <(pactree -lru $1|sort) <(pacman -Qqe|sort) | grep -v $1
}

When I do

whoneeds iptables

it comes back with

error: package 'fail2ban iproute2' was not found
error: could not get information on fail2ban iproute2

and similar for other packages. The error code is 3. It works though if there is no or a single dependency. It's obviously not separating out the package line into individual package names.

What could cause this? I assume this is on my end since nobody else has complained about it.

I just updated the PKGBUILD for pacman 4.1 and other upstream changes.

Yyyyes there is: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/pkgfile/,
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=60915

There is no pkgfile package to conflict with, it was just for convenience.

It should say that it conflicts with pkgfile as it's providing it.

Updated PKGBUILD for the new python version

Sure.
I'm using the regular pkgtools for the time being.

Yeah, the git PKGBUILD is way out of date. It probably won't work off master actually. Wait til the next full release.

I may be wrong, but isn't pkgfile a python script? If so, you need to add python to dependencies and take care of the 2to3 python transition.

Change the rm-line to

[ -d _gitname-build ] && rm -r ${srcdir}/$_gitname-build

I get the following error while building: http://aur.pastebin.com/8vfpgB4t