Settings-view: Many (all?) core packages show "No README"

[rsese]

_From @jaller94 on August 3, 2018 5:29_

Prerequisites

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Description

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go into the packages settings
2. Search and select the about package

Expected behavior: The Readme shows a description of the package’s use. Most likely the text would be the same text as this repository’s README.md.

Actual behavior: It says "No README"

Reproduces how often: every time

Versions

Atom 1.28.0 on Linux_x64
Atom 1.29.0 on MacOS

_Copied from original issue: atom/about#85_

[rsese]

Thanks for the report @jaller94 - I noticed this was the case with other packages besides atom/about (e.g. archive-view, autocomplete-atom-api, autocomplete-css).

Reproduced on macOS 10.12.6 with 1.31.0-nightly0.

[jaller94]

Do they all start with the letter a? 😅

[jaller94]

Also affected: autoflow, autosave
I think I found a pattern.. 😉

[rsese]

lol 😄 No it looks like all the ones I've checked so far are showing the same thing including github and tabs for example, so not just a packages.

[daviwil]

I tried a series of old Atom releases and this problem seems to have occurred between Atom 1.20.1 and 1.21.0. Looking at the release notes for 1.21.0, it seems that there are two changes that are possible culprits:

• atom/atom#14682 - Bring back ASAR archives: Is it possible that bringing back the ASAR file caused issues for normalize-package-data?
• atom/atom#15522 - Convert package-manager from Coffeescript to JavaScript: Converting to JavaScript might have introduced regressions in the code that reads package metadata

I'll continue looking for the root cause.

[daviwil]

@annthurium and I investigated this further and discovered that the re-introduction of ASAR archiving was indeed the culprit. It turns out that we've been excluding Markdown files from the ASAR package which meant that the Settings view could never find README.md files for bundled core packages. PR incoming.