On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:31:46AM +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Design documents have nothing to do with free software, or open source
> for that matter.  For GNU coreutils there is little to talk about
> `design' documents, since such a document would be bigger than the
> actual source code (which I might add is quite easy to follow!) for
> GNU Coreutils.  In other words, the source code is your design
> document.

Unfortunately, the source code does not always have the internal
documentation it should, and can be quite hard to follow.  An excellent
example of this is sort.c.

The problem is not confined to coreutils.  GNU libc, for instance, does
not provide any documentation whatsoever on how it handles locales
internally.  Locales are compiled from human-readable standard format to
a completely undocumented internal format.  For some spectacularly
unreadable code, look at the source for strcoll and strxfrm.

David Feuer


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