pissircd/doc/coding-guidelines

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Rules about patches & modifications to UnrealIRCd
1. When making a change, always add a small description in the commit log.
Don't forget to mention the bug# and credit the reporter (if any).
2. If new files are made, they must contain proper copyright headers.
3. Each bug or feature should have a bug# so people can have a discussion
about it. This has a few implications (read!!):
* People must report bugs/feature requests to bugs.unrealircd.org and
not on IRC, e-mail, etc.
* That means other people can see the bug# and comment on it. This means
discussion is easy to read back for each issue and not spread between
several IRC logs.
Furthermore, by using the bugtracker instead of directly committing,
people could point out that there might be a better way to do things
than you originally thought, or it might be that other devs don't like
it at all.
* If a head coder has 'acknowledged' or 'confirmed' the issue or stated
in a comment that it's OK to implement, then any dev may take the issue.
The dev should change the status to 'assigned' and work on it, then
commit and change it to 'resolved', set 'fixed in version' to the
correct release, and add a comment pasting the relevant commit log.
Of course other guidelines, in particular rule #7, still applies.
4. If you don't have direct write access to the repository then you can
submit changes as as PR on github. It is very much preferred to also
have a bugs.unrealircd.org entry for it as well (see previous item).
5. For the stable branch, in general, only commit changes that have an
associated bugid# and/or were discussed.
For branches currently in development (alpha/beta) there's more freedom
and if you think the change will be small and is fine without a
discussion then feel free to commit.
6. Regarding reidenting, restructuring or other major code cleanups: please
discuss before doing so. The other devs might not agree with you on the
particular cleanup you have in mind which would result in another
clean-up-the-cleanup commit.
You may, however reindent and clean up individual sections when you are
working on fixing a particular bug# or implementing a new feature. In fact
you're encouraged to do so if the code is confusing without it. However,
obey the style of Unreal's code (mostly outlined in this document)
and do not introduce yet another (new) style. Also, be careful with doing
any cleanup: if you're unsure in any way about the use of something,
or something that looks redundant on first sight, then look more
carefully... it might indeed be useless and/or redundant, but it might
also be a subtle thing that can create great bugs when 'cleaned up'.
7. During the Release Candidate stage (from RC1 until the final release)
only the head coder may commit directly, all others should ask and
present their patch before committing. Yes, even if you are changing
only 1 line of code or text.
9. UnrealIRCd should compile on all supported operating systems and
platforms, using GCC 3 or higher on *NIX, and Visual Studio 2008 or
higher on Windows. This means you cannot blindly use all C99 extensions.
10. Coders must test their code before committing.
11. /*
* These kind of comments
*/
NOT
// These kind of comments
12. if (something == 1)
{
moo; /* comment */
/* This does what what what */
cow(go(moo));
}
NOT
if (something == 1) {
}
13. Do not touch version.c.SH or version.h, unless you are a head coder.
If you need a credit in, contact us
14. Protocol changes must be discussed before making patches for it.
15. We do NOT rip people off. If we use other people's code, it MUST be
properly credited.
16. We use tabsize 8 and we use tabs AND NOT SPACES.
Some code is old and horrible and has a mix of tabs and spaces used for
spacing, that's something we do not want to have ;)
17. Be careful about overflows. Do not do any unchecked string copies.
Instead of strcpy, strcat and sprintf/ircsprintf, use the following
functions: strlcpy, strlcat, snprintf/ircnsprintf.
If you are copying/writing character-by-character or word-by-word in a
loop, eg using *p++ = x; then be very sure about your size counting.
Often it's better to avoid such code altogether, by simply using
strlcat for everything.
18. Speed. When optimizing or writing code, keep in mind that readability and
stability comes FIRST, and after that comes speed. So we'd rather prefer some
readable code (even if difficult) over some odd highly optimized routine which
nobody understands, is difficult to extend, and might have several bugs.
As mentioned earlier: use ircsnprintf, not snprintf (this is because
ircsnprintf is optimized for simple strings like the ones we use).
ircsnprintf calls snprintf when it finds a (non-simple) format specifier it
can't handle. Simple format specifiers do not have prefixes other than
h and l.
19. Initialize your structs and use the proper memory calls.
In UnrealIRCd we use safe_alloc, safe_free, safe_strdup and safe_strldup.
Do NOT use malloc, calloc or strdup.
20. Comment your code! This should speak for itself...
Put comments wherever you think they are needed, to aid any further coders
with reading your code.. and, in fact, it will aid yourself as well if you
would look back at your code 2 years later.
If there's some obscure pitfall, DO mention it! Don't just "hope" a next
author will see it like you did.
21. Use enums whenever possible, rather than #define constants. Besides making
things more clean, it also aids debugging.