[Slackbuilds-users] addition for faq or howto

[Klaatu]

I thought about suggesting this myself, some time ago.

I think it's not a bad idea to encourage maintainers to provide an example in the README too, just for the user's convenience.

On 18 May 2018 5:21:56 PM NZST, B Watson <yalhcru at gmail.com> wrote:
>Got an email from a new user... he had read the README for the build he
>was trying to run, and it said to set an environment variable... being
>completely new to *nix, he didn't know how to do that.
>
>Would it hurt to add some text to the HOWTO page explaining this? I
>know it's pretty elementary stuff, but the HOWTO already details how to
>extract a tarball and launch a shell script from the current directory,
>which are also elementary tasks...
>
>Proposed text to add to the end of "Step 2 - Read the README":
>
>---cut-here---
>If the README mentions any options controlled by environment variables,
>you can set these options now by running:
>
>   export VARIABLE=value
>
>For instance, if the README says you can build against SDL 2.0 by
>setting
>SDL2=yes in the environment, you would type:
>
>  export SDL2=yes
>
>If there are multiple options, you can use multiple export commands.
>
>If you're unsure, don't set any variables here. In most cases, the
>SlackBuild maintainer has made the default behaviour (no options) the
>most common or most useful way to build the package.
>---cut-here---
>
>...yes, it's possible (and "cleaner") to just say SDL2=yes
>./whatever.SlackBuild in Step 4, but the way the howto is split up
>into steps, it would make less sense for step 4 to effectively say "Oh,
>by the way, you should have noticed if there were environment variable
>options in step 2". So Step 2 has to mention them, since that's where
>they're visible.
>
>Thoughts?
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-- 
Klaatu
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