[Slackbuilds-users] template find/chmod RFC

[B. Watson]

On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, Erich Ritz via SlackBuilds-users wrote:

> My only suggestion would be IF this change is made to also update all builds that exactly match the old style to the new style.  From what I remember we are encouraged to use the templates in case changes like this are made then we can easily be updated to the new style.

That's something we'd do during a "development cycle", which is what
we call the time when submissions are closed following a Slackware
release.

During the dev cycle, we don't do site updates, which means that
changing several hundred (or thousand) builds in one commit is
allowed. Normally we avoid this because of the overhead of generating
the site tarballs and their GPG signatures.

Until then, maintainers are free to update their builds to use the new
template, but doing a bunch of updates *just* to change the template
(for builds that already work) isn't something we're expecting
everyone to do. You can if you want to, of course.

> The assumption here is that if an existing build uses exactly the same lines in the template then the script maintainer is saying "I'm following the spirit of the template and just want done what the template is doing here" and therefore would want any improvements to the template applied.  If an existing build does not exactly match the template, then that indicates a conscious effort on the script writer to deviate away from the template for some reason, and therefore a conscious effort must be applied (if desired) to update to the new style.

Yes. If the script doesn't match the template, there's probably a
good reason for it. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, explanatory
comments in code have gone out of style... so we're left wondering
"does this deviate for a reason? Is it a reason that still applies
after a version update?"

Example from odamex:

# Every file in 0.9.5 is +x, and none of them need to be!
# Do not revert to template.
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \+
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \+

I've always believed comments shouldn't say *what* the code does
(since the code already says it), they should say *why* the code does
what it does.