Re: Use the code, luke. Was: [sdcc-devel] Questions about sdcc porting

[Kim L. <lu...@di...>]

On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 22:47 +0100, Bernhard Held wrote:
> > <getting on soapbox...>
> >
> > Here is what I don't like about open source:
> >
> > a) There is no documentation
> > b) there isn't enough commentary in the code to figure it out, without
> > being thoroughly familiar with it and if you were then you wouldn't need
> > the comments in the first place.
> > c) past developers don't want to be bothered to go back into their code
> > to help new developers.
> Yes, you're right. I fully agree :-)
> Accept it or forget it.

This is a stupid way to develop software.  The open source community
can't expect to flourish like this.  I know of a certain open source
project that has a certain component written by a certain expert that
said component is full of bugs.  And certain expert didn't document
anything and nobody can understand his work.  Which is probably why it
is full of bugs in the first place.  So... this component is holding up
the whole project because when it crashes it takes down the application.
All this trouble because the developer was too silly to put comments in
code as he was writing it.

Every read "Code Complete", "Writing Solid Code" or "Debugging the
Development Process" ?   I guess those rule don't apply in open
source.   

> > See the two examples below.
> Again: you'll have to find it out by yourself. Nobody (out of the active 
> developers) knows the answers (don't you?). These are exactly the problems 
> I'm facing when I'm hunting bugs. 

Ahhhh... that is the beauty of it.  Lack of comments/documentation bites
us all in the butt.  The code we write is too complex to keep organized
in our mind for a long time, even if we are the author. So... two years
later when a bug needs to be fixed nobody knows what the original intent
was.  

-- 
Kim Lux,  Diesel Research Inc.