Thanks for your help. I've adopted a few R packages in the AUR[1] in the meantime and updated them with the output of this automated script. I've included an example of a current one below. Note that the r-cran-* stuff isn't mine; they're packages other people have already uploaded to the AUR.
I think I've managed to automate everything, the only exception being that there's no way (as far as I can see, anyway) to tell if a package has non-R dependencies (e.g. some packages need gcc-fortran to be installed, but there's no way to tell that automatically I think). Thanks again everyone for your help! Alex Footnotes: [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=jabranham&SeB=m # Maintainer: Alex Branham <--address@hidden--> _cranname=zoo _cranver=1.8-1 _pkgtar=${_cranname}_${_cranver}.tar.gz pkgname=r-zoo pkgver=${_cranver//[:-]/.} pkgrel=1 pkgdesc="S3 Infrastructure for Regular and Irregular Time Series (Zs Ordered Observations)" arch=('any') url="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/${_cranname}/index.html"; license=('GPL') depends=('r' ) optdepends=('r-cran-coda' 'r-cran-chron' 'r-daag' 'r-fts' 'r-cran-ggplot2' 'r-mondate' 'r-cran-scales' 'r-strucchange' 'r-timedate' 'r-timeseries' 'r-tis' 'r-tseries' 'r-xts') source=("https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${_pkgtar}";) md5sums=('bf8789b3a448b5bed39e54e027ee7c6a') build(){ R CMD INSTALL ${_pkgtar} -l $srcdir } package() { install -d "$pkgdir/usr/lib/R/library" cp -r "$srcdir/$_cranname" "$pkgdir/usr/lib/R/library" }
