Just a question of why the README is stripped from the gawk package. It seems that should be placed in /usr/share/doc/gawk, but that directory doesn't even exist. It holds the developer information and instead of having that information as part of the package, I ended up stumbling around gnu.org to find it (which sent me to the savannah.git... source for it)
Seems like a basic README should be in ../doc/pkgname for all packages. According to the PKGBUILD, nothing is being stripped. The Arch Linux package is just an archive of files produced by a script provided by upstream.⁽¹⁾ If the file isn’t present, it’s because gawk is not installing it in the first place.
If anything is missing, consider filing a bug report to gawk
developers at