Here’s the man page for the telnet command in an old Ubuntu release:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/karmic/man1/telnet-ssl.1.html
Scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll find this under BUGS:
The source code is not comprehensible.
The source package is here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/dapper/netkit-telnet
Download it and take a look — it’s genuinely hard to read. A quick scan reveals at least these issues:
- Indentation mixes spaces and tabs, so large parts of the code appear completely unindented.
- Heavy use of #if/#else and a ton of preprocessor macros, including some odd ones like:
#ifndef B19200
#define B19200 B9600
#endif
#ifndef B38400
#define B38400 B19200
#endif- What looks like C++ written in C — there are actual class declarations in terminal.cc.
- Variable names are cryptic (lots of old, tmp, c1, c2, s1, s2, s3), function naming is inconsistent, and there’s basically no coding style guide.
It’s legitimately tough to follow.
Still, huge respect to whoever decided to call out the source code’s readability as an official BUG in the man page.
(via coolshell.cn)