I have to disagee totally with what you are saying here. Very simply the reaon i use open source stuff is because it gives me the ability to customize it to suit my needs. Hope fully in a quick and easy way.

While I often do learn new tricks while making these tweaks that is not the reason I use it. Software is a toll to get a job done for me. To that end if i have to dig around for all the info to understand what I need to change then I might as well write the whole thing from scratch.

IMHO one of the best things about open source is that it tends to be written by those who have a great deal of knowledge about the subject of thier code. For me to go through and understand something like DBI or XML::* take much more than understanding perl. I would also need to know a great deal about databases and XML respectivly. In fact comments are very helpful in learning these things. I can read the comment that explains what the programmer is trying to achive with a given piece of code, which gives me a beeter understanding of the problem and then i can perldoc the functions they use to implement it. This gives me the greatest amount of understanding when I am trying to learn from someone's code.

Lastly to your insight that good commenting allows people to make bad changes to the code without fully understanding it. My first reaction is fine they have to sleep in the bed they make, they break thier own code thats thier right, if they send me a patch with thier change I am going to make sure it makes sence before it goes into the main tree. Second a lack of comments increase the chance they will misconstrue what I am trying to and actually raise the chance of bad changes. Finally if I comment what i am trying to achive and a person more knowledgable in perl understands the goal they can actually send me a better way to do it and i get to learn.