Excerpts from Heiko Baums's message of 2010-11-16 12:48:03 +0100:
Am Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:12:23 +0100 schrieb Andrea Scarpino <andrea@archlinux.org>:
Man you know that is a draft. I don't remember who wants to adopt squashfs- tools now, but surely a TU want because it has been moved to [community] recently.
Man, you know that you have removed most of the packages from your "draft" from [extra].
And I need to install three times as many packages from AUR as I needed three years ago just because they have been removed from the repos to AUR.
And the repos of Arch Linux are pretty small compared to other distros anyway. That's always mentioned as disadvantage in reviews of Arch Linux. This is a bit compensated by AUR, but if you regularly move important or popular packages to AUR then Arch Linux will become a second Gentoo and for some people who want or need a binary distro unusable.
The problem with Arch becoming a second gentoo is that it would be a far worse gentoo. AUR isn't exactly convenient. Sure there are helper programs, but each one I tried buggy or lacking. I doubt maintaining source packages in gentoo is as much a PITA as it is in Arch. It's less a PITA in Arch than in binary distros, but still only really usable as long as Arch is mainly a binary distro. My point in short: Arch is great as long most packages you need are binaries and only some are from source. If Arch requires you to build lots of packages from source it's the worst of both worlds.
And no, Arch Linux is not a distro from developers for developers anymore. This may have been in the beginning or Arch Linux but is not true anymore.
Heiko