| "does not run on my current system" is not a sign of rot; "I cannot even make a guess whether it will be useful for me without trying" is. To make such a guess, the following info can be helpful: - for what platform(s) it is written (e.g. C code where tagged as 'Unix', that use Linux-isms) - what the license is (home page claims 'free' or 'open source', source files mention license A, read me mentions license B) - what the library does and, almost more importantly, what it's limitations are. - what the dependencies of the library are. - what systems the code has run on (it can for instance be useful to know that code has run in big-endian machines if your machine is big-endian) The more of this info is present, the higher the probability that I will try to use your software. There is lots of code out there where too little of this metadata is present. If such software is not solving some unique problem, I would prefer it if its writer did not make it available. |