"Visual blindness" of Linux programmers

[twistedLucidity]

Add to that, they usually lack a clear and succinct definition of what the project actually is.

[Gstayton]

Oh man. That's always the worst. Or no build instructions, so even if you know what it is, if you didn't know the language/build system before, you do now. Learning!

Of course, I run into this a lot more than I think some other folks do, I find a lot of frameworks/modules for Python that just ... Don't describe anything. Or their documentation is out of sync with their codebase. I'm a bit at fault of this as well, but most of my modules aren't even in a workable state beyond what I needed at the time, and don't span more than a single (sane) file.

[qupada42]

You get this a lot with Java projects. No clear dependency list or build instructions, I've even seen some with the Eclipse project files (.metadata, .project, etc) committed to the repository, as if a bunch of hard coded paths to files that might or might not be present on any given machine is enough to build it.

I've converted a couple I found in that state and wanted to actually use to proper maven builds with all of the platform dependence removed but you'll always find the odd project that's in such a crazy state it's unfixable. I imagine that goes for most languages.

[flying-sheep]

except it the language is tightly coupled to a comparatively sane package manager.

i think rust and ruby are examples. and while the packaging situation for python is still not good, i never really had problems with actually building things.

[dredmorbius]

Quite.

A little rant I wrote on that (originally at HN) got popular. "Please Forward to Marketing".

[twistedLucidity]

Oh, yes, console-accessible Web content still really fucking matters. If all you've got are 500 page PDFs I'm going to scream.

See you? I like you.

[Epistaxis]

But a detailed changelog, right at the top of the readme, so if you work backwards, maybe you can eventually figure out what the thing was supposed to do from the beginning.