2009/12/1 Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee@gmail.com>:
When I started on here the mantra was "Arch is what you make it". Packagers strive to make packages which are as vanilla as possible (without breaking) and provide the utility expected of such packages. Of course, if you want a system without hal/dbus, there's ABS and AUR. I don't see why your dislike of particular implementations implies that every user of Arch should forgo those implementations.
I've been thinking about this particular part of the "Arch way". I think what causes the conflict in some of these cases is that "trusting upstream" - one of our major principles - only works when upstream is sane. Wacky things (like what freedesktop.org has been doing to Xorg for a while now) make me begin to think this assumption is violated in some important cases. When upstream ceases to really care about Arch-like systems and only support more Ubuntu-like systems, we have a problem with our "don't patch" philosophy.