Developer Guide

Contributions are more than welcome, and greatly appreciated.

We expect any contributions to be done through Pull-Requests. We also appreciated comments and issues through the Issues tracker.

General Code Conventions

• No trailing whitespace; no trailing empty lines
• No TABs
• Indent set at four spaces

C++ Specific

• “private:” and “public:” tags aligned with “class” keyword
• Class name start with a capital letter
• Filename all lowercase and using dash as word separator
• Header file use “#pragma once”
• Private members start with an underscore (“_”) prefix
• Keep your lines to about 80 characters or less in length
• No copy-and-paste from an open source projects. Clean code is an important requirement. If inserting code taken from other source, specify licenses together with the pull request, and we will evaluate if there is not conflicts.
• When there is something not covered in these instructions, we follow this guide

Apply Code Convections

For easier formatting and linting, we leverage pre-commit. You can locally check your code using:

# Initial setup (first-time)
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

# Manually check files
pre-commit run --all-files

Be sure to solve any issues pre-commit hooks couldn't automatically fix.

Workflow Conventions

We follow this workflow model.

• Develop/debug on a branch, started at "develop":

  git checkout develop
  git pull
  git checkout –b <NEW-FEATURE>

• Prefer smaller, independent commits (make them ideally suited for “cherry-picking”)

  • First line of commit message descriptive of the commit; end with a period (‘.’)
  • One empty line, if more detailed explanations are needed
  • More detailed explanations in as many additional lines as needed
  • Use present tense and active voice (“Fix bug #8848” and not “Bug #8848 fixed” or “Fixed bug #8848”)
  • Keep your lines in the commit message to about 80 characters or less in length

• Please run tests locally prior to creating new pull request. Please see VDMS Test Suite for more details.

• When ready, create a pull request against the "develop" branch.