There is no such thing as "the" top-level goal, so that use case doesn't work: if someone does a parallel build of multiple "top-level" goals the package goal w

There is no such thing as "the" top-level goal, so that use case doesn't work: if someone does a parallel build of multiple "top-level" goals the package goal will still need to do something reasonable. To make this work you need multiple package goals, maybe using a pattern goal, and then the package--which sounds like the thing he user was actually trying to get--is going to be an ultimate goal, not whatever you previously thought was the "top-level" one. Regardless: I haven't tried it yet, but I saw in a changelog that a recent version of make added .WAIT, which sounded like it does what you want.