[rkomar]

@crutledge: You're absolutely right; this is the major problem of all large projects in all languages. It is especially problematic with projects with volunteer developers since coding is fun and documenting usually isn't. The problem here is that to properly document at a high level, you need full understanding of what the code is doing, and if you have that, then you're probably working on bug fixes or new features rather than documenting (the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it's more fun). So, if it's already hard to get volunteers to work on the code, getting volunteers to only do documentation is even harder. The only hope is to use some sort of automated documentation generators on the current source base, and to get some of those experienced developers to take some time to write out some very high level outlines of what's going on. The latter shouldn't take a lot of time, so it has a chance of getting done, and even better, being kept up to date. Documentation that doesn't match the code is worse than useless, it's actually harmful. So, in a project like this, it's probably best to keep the stuff that needs to be manually updated to a minimum.

This is really a problem in organization, which is why it's so good that John is offering to stick around to help manage the project.