Considering the size of the codebase and the amount of developers that have contributed to it over time, I find the comments to be very mild.
Every commercial codebase has hacks and special cases. Limited developer resources, deadlines and idiotic external constraints (hello third party libs/apps!) simply force that.
There is an art to capturing stupid stuff that is beyond your control at the integrating level (with checks, logging and exceptions at that level) without allowing this to contaminate the deeper levels of your system. That's another story entirely.
If you want to read some highly amusing comments in source, read http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html - the list jwz published of the stuff that had to be removed from the Netscape source code before it was open-sourced.
Every commercial codebase has hacks and special cases. Limited developer resources, deadlines and idiotic external constraints (hello third party libs/apps!) simply force that.
There is an art to capturing stupid stuff that is beyond your control at the integrating level (with checks, logging and exceptions at that level) without allowing this to contaminate the deeper levels of your system. That's another story entirely.
If you want to read some highly amusing comments in source, read http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html - the list jwz published of the stuff that had to be removed from the Netscape source code before it was open-sourced.