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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I’m interested that this project, and many other visual projects, don’t have example images in their readme.

I imagine some OSS authors don't consider someone visiting the GitHub readme before visiting their website. I can't fathom thinking like that, but it must have never crossed their mind.

Here's the screenshots: https://stellarium.org/screenshots.html

The project website is at http://stellarium.org/. There is no need to have images inside a project repository. Every maintainer already knows what it looks like. What next? Marketing materials?

Sorry, but one screenshot would be enough to demonstrate what the repository is about.

So many project fail at this.

love to see what your project repo looks like as a comparison.

The website has more than one.

When quickly browsing github projects to see what's worth my time I don't always click the website link.

I likely skip over repos with no screenshot much more.

What purpose are you browsing projects on github? Genuine question, as I've never done this.

To find active popular open source projects?

How do you do it?

Word of mouth, organic exposure. I've only used github search only for a few time aside from quickly finding one of my repositories.

Typically github readme's are targeted at busy developers rather than beginner s as well.

They also include a contributor guide so I can see how hackable some project I'm using is.

I also prefer to use projects I wouldn't hate hacking on if forced to. So a PHP project has a much higher bar than aHaskell project.

Github and other forges easily allow this approach.

I don't actively try to find active open source project, usually I stumble onto plenty of them from natural browsing/research for my own work

That's why I was asking, why would you actively search for projects? To consider contributing or just out of curiosity?

I disagree. Users, not just maintainers, discover projects through GitHub. In this context, the README effectively serves as a secondary project landing page. IMO, for a visual project like this, images, or a direct link to images, is a must.

Then a link to the website which is a much better medium for demonstrating software than README files would be a simple fix.

Then a link to an example image on the web site is much better.

The idea is to help people understand the project. Not to give them an investigation task. I don’t know the structure of that web site or if there are even images there.

The first time in your life that you learn that a project's code lives on GitHub and its documentation and marketing website are someplace else, you'll start looking for the website reference in the GitHub README or searching for it as a matter of course. It's really not that big a deal.

It’s not a big deal. It’s just a useful piece of documentation.

I’m not heartbroken because of this gap, I’m just confused why they wouldn’t want to add these docs to help users.

What’s more amazing to me is that for open source projects like this where anyone can contribute, people would rather complain about the lack of a screenshot instead of submitting a pull request adding a screenshot to the README.

You could probably become a very prolific contributor just by adding a screenshot to every such repo you come across.

I imagine a lot of such pull requests wouldn't be merged.

I submitted one, it may never be merged, but at least now I can say I tried. And isn’t that what open source is about?

If it requires little effort, it's fine, but generally before working on something one should ask the maintainers whether the status quo is deliberate.

They are free to reject the pull request. The worst they can say is no.

I wonder if it is just a change over time? I expect READMEs to be formatted primarily to be opened in the terminal… nice 80 column plain text files.

This is my primary experience with READMEs as well. I feel like this is one of those new users not appreciating the history and morphing into something they understand with zero interest in the old ways

Agreed. It’s a freaking image generator yet there is zero sample picture on their GitHub page… That’s terrible :-/

stellarium.org link is on the GitHub landing page twice - chill.

I followed that link and didn’t see any images there.

I could also google “stellarium project images” but I think my point is that I would expect projects to be as explicit as possible about “this is what we make.”

There's a "view screenshots" link front and center on stellarium.org

here ya go:

http://stellarium.org/screenshots.html

Maybe your ad blocker is acting up? I see a carousel with 5 images and a link to the full screenshots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarium_(software)#Screensh...

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