So things that depend on awk because they call 'awk' will work just fine here? Not without also making a symlink and conflicting with gawk, at the very least.

Things that depend on awk should work, yes. If they make use of features only available in gawk, they should depend on gawk, IMHO.

You're right about the symlink, I didn't take that into consideration.

That's the whole point, this is only installed as nawk, not as awk, so things WON'T work without removing gawk, and that doesn't seem like a good idea.

Right.

My intention was that users who want the full AWK language [installed as awk], and who don't need all the GNU extensions to the language, could install the lightweight nawk.

But yes, we don't have an “alternatives” system like Debian, whereby a system administrator can install, say, gawk, nawk, and mawk alongside one another, and then choose which of them should provide awk.

Perhaps my suggestion should rather be implemented in the vein of dashbinsh from AUR that re-symlinks dash to sh.

Related  FS#26878 

"base" and "base-devel" currently depend on gawk. Without some largish distro rejigging, I cannot see how this can happen...at least until pacman implements an "alternatives" system (which has been talked about, but I can't find reference to right now).

You're right. Without investigating if “base” and “base-devel” really require the gawk extensions to the language, or if they will be fine with a POSIX awk implementation and nothing more, I too can't see how it can be done.

Perhaps this issue should be closed, so as to not waste more people's time.