gnuplot in LaTeX, without gnuplottex

I have avoided using gnuplottex at all by adding the following custom dependency to .latexmkrc:

add_cus_dep('gnu','tex', 0, 'makegnu2tex');
    sub makegnu2tex {
    system("gnuplot \"$_[0].gnu\"") ;
    }

My gnuplot file uses the cairolatex terminal (or any other terminal who produce a .tex file). My latex document contains \input{gnuplot_output.tex} which, because of the newly defined dependency, causes a system call to gnuplot upon tex compilation. The .gnu file and .tex files are now a normal dependency, and gnuplot will not recompile unless the time stamp is changed.

It's important to notice that the path specified in set output "path/gnuplot_output.tex" in the .gnu file is relative to the tex root file as long as the gnuplot system call is induced by latexmk.