[Slackbuilds-users] new maintainers omitting READMEs

[fsLeg]

Here are some READMEs for the programs SlackBuilds for which I maintain:

- popcorntime: <https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/development/README.md>
- dart-sass: <https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/blob/main/README.md>
- shadowsocks-rust: <https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-rust/blob/master/README.md>

So I'm supposed to include these walls of text with ungodly amount of irrelevant information as the script's README? I'd rather copy some relevant short excerpt that describes the piece of software in question and be done with that. If anyone really wants the entire README, it's copied to /usr/doc by the SlackBuild anyway.

SBo is a repository of build scripts, not programs themselves. You don't see walls of text in, say, Debian's package descriptions. Those are of varying lengths, but never too long.

Should READMEs on SBo be more descriptive? Probably. But some developers don't provide a concise description of their programs, or it's way too concise, so the only way of having a more descriptive README would be to write it yourself, and how many maintainers would be willing to do that? It's like writing documentation, almost nobody likes to do that.

I think the idea is that a user would already know what program they need, README would be just to confirm it's the right one. How many people just browse a repo looking for programs to try instead of just googling/knowing something they need and then looking if it's there? Especially a third-party unofficial repo. Also, a lot of packages are just dependencies, not many people care what they do by themselves. Do those need descriptive READMEs? 

On March 25, 2025 17:33:02 GMT+03:00, David Chmelik <dchmelik at gmail.com> wrote:

>Upstream README.* should be README, because it's more information on what a piece of software even is.