[Slackbuilds-users] new maintainers omitting READMEs

[B. Watson]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025, Willy Sudiarto Raharjo wrote:

>>> Should READMEs on SBo be more descriptive? Probably. But some developers 
>>> don't provide a concise description of their programs [...]
>> They all do for first line in sbopkg menu.
>
> sbopkg is designed to help you build the source into native Slackware 
> packages, not to help you READ the DETAIL of the script.

Huh? It does both.

When you select a package in sbopkg, the first menu item is "README",
"View the README file". Also the next 3 options are "View the .info
file", "View the SlackBuild file", and "Choose any file to display".

> Just browse the SBo website for information and use sbopkg (or any other 
> third party tool) to build it. That should solve your problem.

The same information is available in sbopkg, I think people can be
excused for viewing it in sbopkg instead of using a separate app like
a browser.

The OP's complaint isn't really about sbopkg, it's about READMEs in
the SBo repo that are short on detail. He's used to looking at the
READMEs in sbopkg, so that's how he phrased it... but the same would
apply to looking at the READMEs on the web site or in a git clone of
the repo.

I agree, READMEs should explain what the software is/does. They don't
have to go into great detail, but they should usually be longer than
one line.

And yes, if upstream doesn't provide any documentation, that means
the SBo maintainer should write a useful README. It's not hard to do:
presumably if you're packaging the software, you *know* what it is and
what it's for. Just a few of lines of text is all you need.

As a first approximation, cd into the local git/rsync copy of the repo
and run:

find . -name README -a -size -80c

However, not all of these READMEs need to be expanded. An example:

$ cat ./audio/xmms-pulse/README 
xmms-pulse is an XMMS output plugin for the PulseAudio sound server.

That's pretty short, but it does say exactly what the software is.

I might have added a line or two about how to enable it in the XMMS
GUI, but that's not really required for a SBo README. Presumably the
package's /usr/doc documentation will explain this. Also, presumably,
it would be obvious how to enable it, once you're looking at the XMMS
GUI (ease-of-use is supposed to be the whole point of a GUI).