在快速演进的软件生态系统中适配安装说明
Adapting Installation Instructions in Rapidly Evolving Software Ecosystems
AI总结：
本文通过分析 400 个 GitHub 仓库的 1,163 次安装相关 README 提交，归纳六类变更并提出、验证安装文档模板。
摘要：
README 文件在向软件用户提供与安装相关的说明方面发挥着重要作用，并被广泛用于 GitHub 等平台上的开源软件系统。然而，这些文件往往存在各种文档问题，导致理解上的挑战以及内容中潜在的错误。尽管它们十分重要，但对于投入到 README 文件中的文档工作仍缺乏系统性认识，尤其是在与安装相关的说明方面；这些说明对于用户开始使用一个软件项目至关重要。为填补这一研究空白，我们开展了一项定性研究，调查了 400 个 GitHub 仓库中的 1,163 次 README 提交，这些提交聚焦于安装相关章节的更新。我们的研究揭示了 README 提交中的六大变更类别，即安装前说明、安装说明、安装后说明、帮助信息更新、文档呈现以及外部资源管理。我们进一步提供了关于修改行为的详细洞见，并给出这些更新的示例。基于研究发现，我们提出了一个 README 模板，专门用于涵盖与安装相关的章节，供文档维护者在更新文档时参考。我们还通过开展一项在线调查进一步验证了该模板，发现文档读者认为基于我们模板增强后的文档通常具有更好的质量。我们进一步为从业者维护其 README 文件提供建议，并为未来研究方向给出动机……（对 arXiv 而言过长）
英文摘要：
README files play an important role in providing installation-related instructions to software users and are widely used in open source software systems on platforms such as GitHub. However, these files often suffer from various documentation issues, leading to challenges in comprehension and potential errors in content. Despite their significance, there is a lack of systematic understanding regarding the documentation efforts invested in README files, especially in the context of installation-related instructions, which are crucial for users to start with a software project. To fill the research gap, we conducted a qualitative study, investigating 400 GitHub repositories with 1,163 README commits that focused on updates in installation-related sections. Our research revealed six major categories of changes in the README commits, namely pre-installation instructions, installation instructions, post-installation instructions, help information updates, document presentation, and external resource management. We further provide detailed insights into modification behaviours and offer examples of these updates. Based on our findings, we propose a README template tailored to cover the installation-related sections for documentation maintainers to reference when updating documents. We further validate this template by conducting an online survey, identifying that documentation readers find the augmented documents based on our template are generally of better quality. We further provide recommendations to practitioners for maintaining their README files, as well as motivations for future research directions... (too long for arxiv)
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
