----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Mynott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 12:50 PM
> On Saturday, Mar 1, 2003, at 10:27 Europe/London, Lusercop wrote: > > So 2 comments and at least 12 unique unobvious undocumented constants. > I think comment counting is a rather crude metric of code "quality" and > a lot of the constants aren't that unobvious in context since most > people looking at MTA source are likely to know how many seconds there > are in an hour etc. But Roger Pressman, in its book "Software Engineering - A Practitioner's Approach" says that good quality documentation is a good metric for good quality software. I think that this should be taken in consideration. > > That's enough of the *worst* things I've found. Most of it is > > completely uncommented, and the source is scattered in > > loads of little files with a single function in them. > > There are man pages though. > > I am no C guru but I found it relatively easy to modify parts of > djbdns. It's very much old school C and comments aren't a priority for > DJB but I disagree that its particularly badly written code. Of > course he uses his own library functions because he thinks the standard > UNIX ones broken. Certainly there don't seem to be any buffer > overflows or format string holes there AFAIK. Pressman's book agains disagree on you, and so do I. (I'm sorry about this) Good documentation is the basis of a good software project. DJB is a great programmer, but a not-so-good software engineer: he can project, and code. But he can't document its programs so others can understand and help. This is as bad as a "bad coder", IMHO. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Luis Campos de Carvalho Computer Science Student =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
