  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)
