That's a good story. I ran into the same issue when I wrote Actually Portable Executable. Most operating systems and libc implementation have been "ported to death" in the sense that it's nearly impossible to determine the actual typing of interface structs and typedefs, due to a labyrinthine web of #ifdefs and macros. So most of the time, rather than reading the C source code, I'd just read the object disassembly and STABS listings. It's very disheartening that open source can suffer such tragedy of the commons that the source code is less useful than the binaries. Tyranny of the minority.