Really? On my Debian system, at least an old version of the software is in the repositories 90% of the time, and simply doing: sudo apt-get build-dep $PACK

Really? On my Debian system, at least an old version of the software is in the repositories 90% of the time, and simply doing: sudo apt-get build-dep $PACKAGENAME gets all the stuff I need to build the software, and then all that's left is ./autogen.sh --prefix=/local/test/prefix make make install and things Just Work. I've never had a big problem with dependencies -- other than Xorg, where the issue wasn't with obscureness. The issue was with requiring a number of dependencies from git. That sort of problem really isn't something you can resolve by anything other than documentation. As for Sourceforge.net, it's bug tracker software has the worst UI I've ever seen. Even email beats it, IMO. But I agree with you about the need for easier code browsing and documentation. Still, tools like 'cscope' go a long way to figuring out what's going on with the source, and grep + ctags in vim will take you the rest of the way. edit: fix formatting