surely if it's open source, people can just look at the source code and deduce what it should do, and imagine what their computer would do in response to it.
in theory this would work but unfortunately a large portion of current generation People don't have the processing power to handle most applications so in practice this isn't yet a feasible alternative
the installation instructions act as a cache. people can read them, which is fast, instead of doing computations that could take a long time. ergo, the developer precomputes how to install the software, and writes it down so future computation on how to install the software can be performed in amortised Ο(1) time
that's a faster cache. some caches are faster than others. the instructions are only for if the faster cache of a package not being available in an external repository or in the AUR does not yet exist.
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