[Slackbuilds-users] templates and guidelines

[David Spencer]

> Hi to all,

Hi Petar and everybody,

> SBo provides templates that cover different sources types, as well as
> slack-desc, README, etc. How about guidelines about package file
> install locations? Something similar to what CRUX has:

Interesting question, thanks. Here are some personal answers, I don't
want to commit any of the other admins to anything!

To start, are we all happy with "guidelines" and advice and education,
but not "rules"?  (I am!)

If a maintainer submits stuff that doesn't meet the guidelines in my
head, I am happy to help when the submission is reviewed. The
maintainer is the upstream software expert, and the reviewer is the
downstream packaging expert, and we are partners. If the maintainer
doesn't know my guidelines, that's ok, because the guidelines are not
all written down, or they exist only in an old email on this list, or
they are constantly evolving.

*But* I don't apply the guidelines in my head consistently or
transparently, and this process definitely confuses some maintainers
and adds more to my workload. In my personal opinion, I need to find
the time to communicate the guidelines better and open them up to
community feedback. The big problem is finding some way of doing that,
without just creating a huge wiki of badly edited pages that nobody
has time to read. The other problem is that I don't want to share real
examples of "bad" submissions in public.

> It will be useful if there is a template for .desktop files, when
> provided by the SlackBuild maintainer.

Sometimes our guidelines evolve when we get a better understanding,
and this is an interesting example. Thanks to recent help from B
Watson I now understand how to validate desktop files :) So yes, we
can now do a desktop template. There are also things to discuss about
the perl and python templates, maybe June could be SBo Template Month
:)

> for example:
> - when is it advisable to install things to /opt
> - where should jar files go
> - extra binaries? should they go to /usr/libexec or /usr/lib${LIBDIRSUFFIX}
> Another thing. Versioning of packages installed from git sources.

good list -- it would be great if other people have more items to add
to the list? please?

> Providing proper download links to git sources has been a pain not
> just for me, I believe. I was so frustrated, I found it necessary to
> write a blog post about this, for my future reference:
> https://slackalaxy.com/2017/05/01/github-download-links/

It was pprkut who first brought the github trick to our attention ;)

> Maybe there could be some instructions about this at SBo?

You've made a good start :) Something I want to do is to document the
best DOWNLOAD for other cases like Sourceforge, CPAN, Pypi etc etc.
and I think https://twinery.org/ would be a great tool for that. But
that would be a personal experiment, let's see if it's successful.

Thanks Petar for the valuable feedback. It really does help us (me!)
to prioritise what we need to do next.

As I said above, it would be great if other people could add to the
list of things that need guidelines please!

Cheers
-D.