Hi, just as in title. I mean not what purpose serve but how it looks. Components, can we divide script into. It is just what comes to your mind. We do not talk here about bash scripting. Say like cow descripiton: is animal, has four legs, tail, two horns, give milk, beef. Goal is to create scheme like json scheme or xml scheme for proper text human-readable description of a script and then translator (parser) which would produce correct bash script. So starting point is free language description and go into details to finally obtain something which can be directly encoded as scheme.

As Slackbuilds.org provides a template for slackbuild scripts, why not have a look at that and see what it contains?

Nope, it is not a solution I am looking for. Human-readable means that everyone even person with zero knowledge of bash would build its own packages - just provide correct description according to scheme - parse this to bash script with parser. At the end run the script.

So, is this something where you would add in the description, the url and your program would magically create a package for you?

If so,would you also ask he user to pick between build systems? cmake vs autoconf vs any other?

That is nonsense.
Using slackware requires a lot of knowledge, without [knowing] bash it is simply impossible.

Constructing another format to [be able to] generate bash scripts is just meaningless, most probably you either need to embed real bash code lines or you will be restricted to use only a small part of the language.
If there was another form/syntax you could directly execute that, without converting to bash. But I'm afraid there is no such thing.

So how do programs like flex do it? I understand that they can produce real C code. Well, if C, why not bash?

All your remarks are interesting but at least we can try to talk about. Starting point is to provide free-language description what sbo script is. Let ask me what is this?
Essentially there is no need to provide description for the first line - it is once for all time fixed. For if construction the simplest possibility is just omit description of temporary directory if I don't care. If I care then say I would print something like that "temporary directory": foobar, now it is up to parser engine to set value of TMP variable to foobar. And so on, so on. So parsing here rather means provide script plus required by script environment.

You are missing the point. Not every bash script but only sbo scripts - they have simple structure as scripts. Describe script in you own words - what they are - this what I am asking for.

I think you are posting in wrong thread. Maybe in some other place were people are interesting in learning bash scripting.

I can only repeat the same: you are posting in wrong thread.

You should go through the templates. Anyway, I'm sure there's plenty of variation (e.g., different build systems, and not all are compiling from source). But in general you're 1) setting some variables (program name, version, work directory, etc); 2) determining architecture; 3) extracting the source files and setting permissions; 4) setting build flags/compiling; 5) clean up, copying extra files and preparing whatever needs to be in the final installable archive (docs, etc); 6) creating the installable archive.

SlackBuild = bash script

You cannot know a SlackBuild script without knowing at least some bash scripting.
There is no other answer than to learn bash.

Why should someone explain something over and over when it has already been explained over and over?

Thanks. Now the point is describe template in own words: what this stands for etc. If there are differences in build systems how they are encoded inside a script? Fixed encoding? Value of parameter. One can put in script descriptio eg. "engin": python etc.