Arch Linux User Repository

I never said the gcc package is mandatory to build packages. What I said is that the gcc is provided by base-devel and so it shouldn't be listed in makedepends. When you build packages, you are expected to have base-devel installed, just like you are expected to have base installed in an Arch Linux installation. This is nothing to agree or disagree on, these are distribution guidelines.

Regarding the second point, I never said that you should fetch master! You should fetch the desired version of the package, but from the upstream. CRAN is the official R package repository, but is not the official upstream for the projects. The upstream is where the projects are developed, which is not CRAN. Fetching the packages from the upstream has several benefits: it's less likely that the sources have been tampered with, sometimes there are GPG signatures available (could be via signed commits/tags), usually it's more clear on what is included in the source, etc.

I disagree with you. gcc dependency is not mandatory for all packages. Some AUR or even official packages can build themselves without GCC suite or any compilers at all. Hence a lot of packages which actually need gcc as part of building process claims it as makedepends explicitly.

Also I can't agree with second point. CRAN is official R packages repository and provides quite stable releases. It's not 3rd-party place! Many R developers maintains separate repo such as GitHub, GitLab etc for current development but eventually upload final versions to the CRAN. Moreover according to this VCS and stable packages differ from each other. Git versions of packages tracks master branch which could be quite unstable so there are a lot of examples in AUR when the same package exists in two forms: stable and VCS (with -git suffix). It's common practice. Even you have such example: osmo-fl2k and osmo-fl2k-git. So my suggestion is to have both versions of swirl package.

The R packaging guidelines in the Wiki are currently wrong, and it seems like that you were thhe one that modified them. gcc is part of base-devel which is expected to be installed when building packages, hence it is not needed to be listed in the make dependencies. I removed that entry from the wiki.

It is always preferred to fetch the source from the upstream instead of a 3-rd party repo, like CRAN. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the current PKGBUILD.

I can add you as a co-maintainer if want to bump the pkgrel but please do not make significant changes to the PKGBUILD without contacting me. Let me know if you want.

Please move to CRAN build or rename and rework current PKGBUILD to be compliant with Package Guidelines. You can use r-metadynminer-git and r-rustinr-git as examples