Warp wrote:
>   Fortunately mplayer isn't such a software.

I did not mean to imply it was, nor that all open source software is 
that way.

>   Can you give me an example of a library which is almost completely
> undocumented?

Many are, usually in the initial phases when they really need the most 
help to get going.  As I said, Freenet was essentially undocumented for 
about 5 years when it started.  Apache 2.0 was undocumented for over a 
year, without even mentioning in the documentation distributed with the 
package that the documentation was from a different and completely 
incompatible version.  CouchDB has no documentation on what the file 
formats are, which makes it difficult to learn anything or understand 
and of the code without learning all of it.

It's not so much that the project isn't documented. It's that the 
project *is* documented, but the documentation isn't put anywhere that 
people willing to help (or at least provide suggestions) can get to it. 
I find it tremendously hard to believe that anyone would write a major 
distributed database engine without ever once embodying the format of 
the data stored in the files other than in the source code. It would be 
like beliving Microsoft never documented the format of Word files, and 
always told new programmers "just read the source to figure it out."

>   In fact, many open source libraries have pretty decent documentations.
> One example: http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/

Yes, many do. I have, sadly, run up against way too many that don't, 
usually when my boss says something like "Hey, I just heard about X, 
let's use that!"

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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