[ntp:questions] Details about code structure

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.isc.org
Thu Nov 22 03:58:39 UTC 2007


Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> It's never easy to wrap your mind around someone else's code, especially 
> when there's that much of it.  It's even tougher if you're not really 
> fluent in C.  I can struggle though it but I'm not what you'd call fluent.
> 
> Rather than writing a separate document, I'd recommend carefully 
> commenting the code itself.  This would include identifying what the 
> variables and data structures represent, and cross referencing the code 
> to the RFC.  I'm not going to hold my breath though.  Most programmers 
> would rather write code than documentation.

I always do that. It doesn't help to write code that noone else can
understand. There really is a need for design implementation documents
but in an open source project the documents get obsoleted very quickly.
Dave has plenty of project design documents on the implementation that
is heavily oriented towards how the algorithms work and why.

Danny



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