Hi,
The /etc/arch-release file is empty and I can understand that since Arch is a rolling release distro but this can cause issues with other packages.

In particular open-vm-tools checks the content of the file to report the operating system version to VmWare and spams syslog with the following messages every 30 seconds:

localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [vmsvc] HostinfoReadDistroFile: Cannot work with empty file.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [vmsvc] HostinfoOSData: Error: no distro file found
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get OS info.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [guestinfo] Error sending GuestMemInfo.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to send vmstats.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [vmsvc] HostinfoReadDistroFile: Cannot work with empty file.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [vmsvc] HostinfoOSData: Error: no distro file found
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get OS info.
localhost vmsvc[560]: [ warning] [guestinfo] Error sending GuestMemInfo.

Even if this could be resolved by patching open-vm-tools, I still think it would be easier and free of unexpected side-effects to just put something inside /etc/arch-release.
I propose to put the filesystem $pkgver in /etc/arch-release as it is both meaningful content (2011.08) and easy to maintain with a single line in the PKGBUILD:

echo $pkgver > "$pkgdir/etc/arch-release"

Thanks.