Arch Linux User Repository

The wiki doesn't say the base-devel package has to be installed fully:

This is a fair argument :) There was also another line "Note: Packages in the AUR assume that the base-devel group is installed, i.e. they do not list the group's members as dependencies explicitly.", but I agree it wasn't quite clear.

To be consistent all the way down, I adapted the wiki to say "Ensure the base-devel package group is installed in full".

The wiki doesn't say the base-devel package has to be installed fully:

Ensure the base-devel package group is installed

But since the PKGBUILD does expect users to have gcc installed, which is part of this package group and is not listed in the PKGBUILD, I'm removing pkgconf from the build dependencies in the name of consistency.

Note that neither cat nor uname are necessary to build the project ;)

Unfortunately you are missing the point of AUR, it's a repo of PKGBUILDs that follow certain conventions, one of them being the expectation of base-devel group being installed in full. The wiki I referred you to is the place where this is documented, and it clearly says "Before using AUR, make sure to install base-devel group".

Notice that you aren't ensuring that make is installed for example, or cat or uname for that matter, so your PKGBUILD does have some expectations on the users' system, it's just that your expectations are different from the ones that people commonly agreed on when using AUR.

There's a possibility that pkg-config wouldn't be installed on a given system (because you can choose not to install it as part of base-devel, Docker image or not), so it has to be in the build dependencies.

Also the entire point of PKGBUILD is to make sure everything required to build the package is installed, I don't see how it has any impact on "quality". Expecting users to "read the wiki" instead of running a command that will produce a package without any other kind of interaction is a terrible idea.

That's not a package name, even if it worked. Environments that don't follow arch conventions are simply not suited to build packages from AUR, you shouldn't spoil PKGBUILD quality just because someone is unable to read wiki. Tell them to use docker images that contain base-devel and they will be fine.

pacman -S pkg-config worked, so I use that package name.

In environments that don't have base-devel installed by default, e.g. Docker images, users can pick which utilities to install from base-devel, leaving a chance that pkg-config won't be installed at the time of compiling.

lenormf: pkg-config is actually called pkgconf, but in any case you shouldn't add it to makedepends because it's already part of base-devel group which is already expected to be installed by everyone who uses AUR: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

The check() function needs to export debug=no before calling make, otherwise the PKGBUILD recompiles the binary in debug mode before running the test suite:

check() {
  cd "${srcdir}/${pkgname}/src"
  debug=no make test
}

As of e9802ba, the asciidoc dependency is not needed anymore.

Could this PKGBUILD define a 'provides' relation for kakoune? That should allow dependent packages to use either this package or the one in community[1].

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/kakoune/