Developer guidelines
This set of guidelines is intended for O2scl developers.
General coding guidelines:
Documentation guidelines:
- Refer to other classes with \ref if necessary. Refer to function parameters with \c or embed them in html TT (text-type) commands.
- Bibliographic references should be used. When possible, include the DOI link which begins with the prefix http://dx.doi.org (not the vendor-specific DOI link).
- Comment Doxygen documentation with \comment and \endcomment. (Yes, sometimes comments in comments are useful.)
Patches:
- For those who are uncomfortable with Subversion, patches are always accepted.
- Prepare patches based on the most recent version of the trunk or the appropriate branch.
SVN:
- Editing the trunk directly should be avoided. Most development should occur on branches, to be merged with the trunk at the appropriate time.
- Ideally the trunk should always compile and all the tests should pass.
- Communicate with the lead developer before, during, and after any non-trivial development. Communicate your ideas before development, so that you don't write many lines of code only to find that your new code will be rejected. Communicate your ideas during development to avoid conflicting changes. Communicate your ideas after development to ensure they have a chance of being implmented. Subversion is not a replacement for real communication.
- Commit often.
- Merge carefully. If you fail to merge correctly, code added by other developers will be (at least temporarily) lost.
- Branches will be merged into the trunk by the lead developer at whatever time they deem appropriate.
- Developer-specific files which are not platform-independent should not be added to the repository. Sometimes svn:ignore can be used to ignore these files, but this should be done sparingly.