spelunking

If that means source-diving without clear documentation about how to do that spelunking, fine.

This level of anal spelunking for the privilege to work on speeding up excel macros and word auto-completion?

You seem to mostly be doing merges or documentation changes, which probably means you don't have to do a lot of history spelunking to fix bugs caused months ago.

If it's not in The Book, you essentially can't find it anywhere, unless your mailing list spelunking skills are particularly good.

The last one, API spelunking is what every trip to Java land feels like.

I'll take any excuse for a little code spelunking -- according to Perforce it was Scott, in October 2002.

I don't know what your situation is like that would cause rebasing to make spelunking harder.

I think the majority of people on our team don't like rebasing because it makes spelunking harder in some cases.

After that, if I don't have a particular bug I'm looking to fix or feature to add, I just go spelunking.

I've spent a fair amount of time dealing with xperf/WPA and spelunking ETLs and find that it's a really nice environment.

Recent log spelunking for me included 'cat log.?

Every time I look at a new function I have no clue what the parameters actually are without spelunking around to figure it out.

His spelunking through the binary shows "uImage" which is the U-Boot[0] header/wrapper for a kernel image.

Edit 3: I'd also argue that your "API spelunking" nightmare is at its nastiest in OO systems.

It could be interpreted as a noun-noun compound; "machismo adventuring" would be akin to "cave spelunking" or "ego exploring".

I have no formal CS education, I get lost when spelunking through big code bases, I need to "learn Linux." But it seems to me that a better approach is needed.