[mcrittenden]

As a new Arch user, this is really useful info. I too was confused by this and I've been avoiding packages with names like these.

[copper]

Hm, as a general rule, I'd actually suggest continuing to avoid such packages in general, unless you know that they're what you need: you need to track whether there's been a source code update, whether someone broke the upstream build, whether your current versions of other packages depend on it

(example: x264-git, pretty much requires that you also install libav-git/mplayer-git, and then of course blender doesn't work, and so on. It can become quite messy at times.)