@theYinYeti, you should be able to strip all the makedependencies that are already in base-devel and base, as those can be assumed as installed for all packages.
Specifically, that means you can drop bzip2, coreutils, gawk, grep, gzip, sed, systemd, tar, util-linux, xz (see base). libcap and curl are also transitively included via iputils and libelf.
The only thing that is left then is fontconfig.
To be clear, I am only referring to the makedeps array, not any content within e.g. _upstream_equiv, I have no clue about that :D
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theYinYeti commented on 2018-01-04 08:33
About upstream: 1º Upstream does not maintain past versions of packages, so I have no choice but to follow new releases. 2º Upstream does not advertise minor/patch releases. These are the reasons why the PKGBUILD is made to adapt itself the best it can to the current upstream situation, whatever it is. If an incompatible change occurs, do not hesitate to mark the package as “obsolete”: I will get notified, and fix the the package as soon as my free time allows. Cheers :-)