>Based on my reading of this Arch wiki page[0], it looks like this doesn't impact packages in the AUR.

Yes. AUR is excluded from reproducible builds because it only provides build scripts and not actual packages. There is nothing to reproduce. One surely could make a repo and compare results, but it would frankly be a bit futile considering the general package quality there.

AUR packages are source only so there's no binary package that is distributed to be verified.

that's only mostly true.

take for example the aur package for MS fonts; https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-fonts/

all it does is download a ton of microsoft corefont executables to unpack.

another example would be the proprietary driver packages, like the nvidia ones.

This is a question of the artifacts distributed as part of Arch Linux, the tar.xz packages. The idea is to be able to reproducibly build a package from source (where "source", yes, may include binary assets and blobs), and check that the copy you built matches what Arch distributes, byte for byte. This way, you know the packager hasn't introduced unexpected changes.

Since end users build AUR packages themselves, there is nothing distributed, and nothing to verify.

You're describing what those AUR builds do not what they are.

Reproducible builds are for artifacts that are... built. Plenty of AUR recipes download blobs and explode them, but the resulting xz package isn't actually hosted in the AUR.

A tool like rebuilderd would only be relevant to the AUR in the case that somebody is publishing generated AUR packages to a repo for others to install without building them directly, and then you'd like to verify those.

I think of the AUR packages as more like ebuilds with fewer safety catches 8)

proprietary drivers from nvidia are provided by the Arch mainline (core) though?

right you are, i've been on beta for years and had forgotten.

point still stands, aur does distribute executables once in awhile.

> aur does distribute executables once in awhile.

The AUR doesn't distribute those executables; it distributes the instructions for the user (or some software working on behalf of the user) to go fetch the executables themselves. This is an important distinction, because the official Arch repositories _do_ distribute executables, directly to the user.