Excerpts from François Charette's message of Mon Apr 21 13:37:01 -0500 2008:
Seriously, I am happy with texlive in community. I have already prepared a test package of texlive-bin from the svn repo, in preparation for the forthcoming release of "TeXLive 2008". Everything compiled just fine. Things have improved upstream and the maintainance will be simplified (which is good for me!). I'll also move the installation from /opt to /usr, which will things simpler. And users will soon have bleeding-edge binaries of pdftex, xetex, luatex and even xindy.
If you choose to keep tetex in extra, I would suggest you add a big warning message in the install scriptlet that advises the user that it is outdated and not maintained, and that they may probably prefer to install texlive from community instead (just my 2¢)...
OK, so it seems to me that the TeX-dependent portion of archlinux community is pretty small and proposed changes (move tetex to community) didn't appeal to DYI nature of Arch. Fine. I'll contact the tetex dev (Jason Chu) with a request to add a texlive info/warning to tetex install script. This change is hopefully small enough and sensible that it would go through. One more piece of "evidence" that something like this would be desirable: today somebody uploaded to AUR a latex package, which a part of texlive-core package - so apparently the person had no idea texlive is around. Best, -- Jan Spakula