HACKING

The Tripod hacking guidelines are based on the Banshee hacking guidelines.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/plain/HACKING

Obey them!

In addition to the banshee guidelines, the following ones are defined for
Tripod:


Code Comment Guidelines
=======================

Good code and naming are self-explanatory. However, it is hard to find out
how things work when they are spread around multiple files. Also Threading
stuff is often hard to figure out.

Therefore, the following rules are introduced for code documentation:

  1. Add a (short) code comment (XML Documentation Comments [1]) to every class
     which is declared. The comment must describe the behavior of the class. If
     special attention must be paid for using the class, it must be also covered
     by the comment. After reading the comment, the users/developers should be
     aware of do's and dont's related to this class. (e.g. thread-safeness)
     
  2. Interfaces must be completely documented. Therefore, code comments [1]
     are mandatory for every method and property. The same holds for abstract
     members. We are this strict about interfaces because they are the most
     important data types in the application: most programming happens against
     them. Developers should be able to understand how the code works just by
     looking at the interfaces and not need to consider the code where the
     interfaces are used. Similarly, if you're not coding against the
     interfaces, you're probably doing it wrong.

  3. You should try to make sure that whenever somebody unfamiliar with the code
     reads it, he/she should still be able to understand it and change it (if
     needed) without breaking it. Add comments where you feel they will be
     needed for future maintenance and understanding of the code.



[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b2s063f7.aspx