It Might Be a Unix Sin But I Would Like You to Add .txt As the Extension of Your README file
bnf
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bnf’s Comments
- bnf on It Might Be a Unix Sin But I Would Like You to Add .txt As the Extension of Your README file
- April 30, 2013 7:48 PM
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I remember first starting to download open source software in the 1990ies. It is better than the usual shareware: no annyoing pop ups and countdowns. There is all these files though: COPYING AUTHORS INSTALL. What do I do with them? Luckily there is a file called README, which makes me think of the README.txt files that Explorer proposes me to open with Notepad. It turns out I can open README as well with a text editor:
I wonder: who are these people in Boston? Why do they ask me to write them letters in the day and age where I download their software from the internet? And why didn’t they add
.txtto the end of their filenames?Reply
Well, at least you managed to download software that also included a runnable program. In my first encounters with open source software I would literally come across source files: computer code that still needs to be compiled (and I had no clue how that worked).
There’s open and there’s open: you might offer the source code to a program for free, but that does not mean the knowledge contained therein is accessible, unless a user is prepared to learn a lot about the culture of how programmers do things.
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This also the problem with README.md. Markdown is a format for writing html codes in a typewriter plain text style, adored within the culture of programmers. Popular code hosting site Github renders README.md for you. But when you download a software package including such a file, it breaks in much the same way as an extensionless README does: A novice user does not know with which program to open it, and the Operating System is not able to give a preview.
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Maybe they can start to recognise README.md.txt?
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by Rich - April 30, 2013 8:43 PM
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