telodendria/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Telodendria is a fully open source project. As such, it welcomes contributions. There are many ways you can contribute, and any way you can is greatly appreciated. This document details the ways you can contribute, and how to go about contributing.

Sponsoring Telodendria

If you would like to sponsor Telodendria, see the Sponsorship section on the main project page. Donations of any size are greatly appreciated.

Reporting Issues

An important way to get involved is to just report issues you find with Telodendria during experimentation or normal use. To report an issue, go to Issues → New Issue and follow the instructions.

Note: GitHub issues are not accepted. Issues may only be submitted to the official Gitea instance.

Feature Requests

Feature requests are allowed, but note that they are low-priority in comparison to existing issues and features. That being said, don't hesitate to submit feature requests. Just select the "Feature Request" option when submitting an issue.

Developing

If you want to write code for Telodendria, either to fix an issue or add a new feature, you're in the right place. Please follow all the guidelines in this document to ensure the contribution workflow goes as smoothly as possible.

Who can develop Telodendria?

Everyone is welcome to contribute code to Telodendria, provided that they are willing to license their contributions under the same license as the project itself.

The primary language used to write Telodendria code is ANSI C. Other languages you'll find in the Telodendria repository include shell scripts, mdoc, a little bit of HTML and CSS, and Makefiles. Experience with any of these is preferred, but if you want to use Telodendria to learn, that's okay too! Telodendria's code base should hopefully be a good learning tool, and if you are serious about submitting quality work, we'll guide you through the process and offer suggestions.

What do I need?

You'll need a couple of things to develop Telodendria:

• A Unix-like operating system that provides standard POSIX behavior, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Cygwin, or Msys2 if you are running Windows.
• A C compiler capable of compiling ANSI C89 code (pretty much all of them do—pick your favorite, and if you find it doesn't work, open an issue!).
• make for building the project.
• git for managing your changes.

Optionally, you may also find these tools helpful:

• indent for formatting code.
• valgrind for debugging particularly nasty issues.

Getting The Code

Telodendria is developed using Git. The easiest way to contribute changes is to fork the main repository, and then creating a pull request to ask us to pull your changes into our repo.

1. If you don't have an account on the Gitea instance, create one and sign in.

2. Fork this repository.

3. In your development environment, clone your fork:

   git clone https://git.telodendria.io/[YOUR_USERNAME]/telodendria.git
   cd telodendria
   

   Please base your changes on the master branch. If you need help getting started with Git, that is beyond the scope of this document, but you can find many good tutorials on the web.

Building & Running

Telodendria uses the make build system.

TODO: Update this section before #19 is closed. Provide quick make, run, and install directions (maybe just redirect to Porting for install directions), then list all the make recipes. Shouldn't be as many as were in td.

Pull Requests

Note: Telodendria does not accept GitHub pull requests at this time. Please submit your pull requests via Gitea.

Telodendria follows the standard pull request procedures. Once you have made your changes, committed them, and pushed to your fork, you should be able to open a pull request on the main repository. When you do, you will be prompted to write a description. Be sure to include the related issue that you are closing in your description.

Code Style

In general, these are the conventions used by the code base. This guide may be slightly outdated or subject to change, but it should be a good start. The source code itself is always the absolute source of truth, so as long as you make your code look like the code surrounding it, you should be fine.

• All function, enumeration, structure, and header names are CamelCase. This is preferred to snake_case because it is more compact.
• All variable names are lowerCamelCase. This is preferred to snake_case because it is more compact. One exception to this rule is if a variable name, such as a member of a struct, directly represents a JSON key in an object specified by the Matrix specification, which may be in snake_case.
• Enumerations and structures are always typedef-ed to their same name. The typedef should occur in the public API header, and the actual declaration should live in the implementation file, unless the enumeration or structure is intended to be made fully public.
• A feature of the code base lives in a single C source file that has a matching header. The header file should only export public symbols; everything else in the C source should be static.
• Except where absolutely necessary, global variables are forbidden to prevent problems with threads and whatnot. Every variable a function needs should be passed to it either through a structure, or as a separate argument.
• Anywhere that C allows curly braces to be optional, there still must be curly braces. This makes it easier to read the code by making it less ambiguous, and it makes it easier to add on to the code later.

As far as actually formatting the code goes, such as where to put brackets, and whether or not to use tabs or spaces, use indent to take care of that. The repository contains a .indent.pro that should automatically be loaded by indent to set the correct rules. If you don't have a working indent, then just indicate in your pull request that I should run my indent on the code.

Documentation

This project places a strong emphasis on documentation. Well-documented code is fundamental to a successful project, so when you are writing code, please also make sure that it is documented appropriately.

• If you are adding a header, make sure you add the necessary comments detailing the header and the functions in it.
• If you are adding a function, make sure you add the necessary comments to the appropriate header.

If your pull request does not also include proper documentation, it will likely be rejected.