Take the 2-minute tour ×  It is really frustrating to find that
every other open source project's source code and documentation
etc., follows slightly or hugely different directory structure
and naming conventions.    1. How do I quickly orient my self to
the directory/naming conventions?   2. Get to the overall
architecture of the app without going through a bunch of source
code files?   3. How do I make reaching to the relevant code
(that I am interested in) quicker? share|improve this question
2 Answers 2  up vote 2 down vote accepted  The best way is to
download the whole project under your favorite IDE and use the
IDE tools to gain a first overview.  For the Apache Software
Foundation for example, they have just one huge Subversion root
from which you can pull any single project in a few clicks using
Eclipse. This creates a project in your workspace and you can
use all the powerful tools of Eclipse to understand the class
hierarchy, navigate (Ctrl/click) from one class to the next or
just search artefac