I wonder how opinions on this matter would change if ten thousand arm-only packages were dropped on the AUR overnight? What are the odds of that happening? Also, how could a further decision not handle that case at said point? Architecture-specific software has been a niche for almost decades now since cpus became satisfyingly fast to run compiled code. Maybe I just personally don't use assembly widely enough and hence don't see the problem.
cheers! mar77i
i think, arm-only packages (as well as other unofficial architectures) should stay out of AUR. the current state is that almost all packages i encounter as a normal arch user are principially runnable for me. this looks different from an arm perspective. for them, most packages are not usable and it depends on their luck and work, to get things building. if we allow more non-official architecture packages in the AUR, the situation will not improve very much for the unofficial archs. but for conventional arch users, it becomes much more likely to encounter a package that does simply not build on their architecture. since AUR is open source, other architectures should use an own setup, to keep things clean and userfriendly. this means some more administration work, but i think, this provides best usability for all users. the word package here means tarball from the AUR. thanks for considering.