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I'm an arch user as well, and since I didn't want to package ROS myself, I just took the ubuntu packages, and built a PKGBUILD around it. I made it for the current ros-electric-base version 1.0.0, but I suppose you could do something similar for furte or the desktop packages.

The PKGBUILD does a bit more than installing the files that are contained in the *.deb files, such as:

• Changes /usr/bin/python and /usr/bin/env python to python2, such that you don't have to modify your python symlink, which on arch probably points to python3.
• Contains 2 patches that make rosdep work with pacman.
• Generates some symlinks to libboost and 2 other libs. This is kind of dirty, but the *.deb files were compiled against some older libraries, e.g. boost-1.46, but arch already is at 1.49. I could have masked newer versions of boost, but I always like to have the newest versions (one reason why I use arch), and as long as the API doesn't change a lot, you should be fine. But feel free to modify the PKGBUILD to your needs.

You'll find the necessary files following the links below. Just place the files in a folder in your abs-directory and call makepkg. The resulting package (*.tar.xz) can be installed with pacman -U <packagename>.

• PKGBUILD - http://paste2.org/p/1946599
• installers.py.patch - http://paste2.org/p/1946600
• arch.py.patch - http://paste2.org/p/1946604
• ros-electric-ros-base.install - http://paste2.org/p/1946605