-Here are some guidelines for working on the Guile source tree at GNU.
-
-- As for any part of Project GNU, changes to Guile should follow the
-GNU coding standards. The standards are available via anonymous FTP
-from prep.ai.mit.edu, as /pub/gnu/standards/standards.texi and
-make-stds.texi.
-
-- Check Makefile.in and configure files into CVS, as well as any files
-used to create them (Makefile.am, configure.in); don't check in
-Makefiles or header files generated by configuration scripts. The
+Here are some guidelines for members of the Guile developers team.
+
+CVS conventions ======================================================
+
+- We use CVS to manage the Guile sources. The repository lives on
+egcs.cygnus.com, in /egcs/carton/cvsfiles; you will need an account on
+that machine to access the repository. Also, for security reasons,
+egcs presently only supports CVS connections via the SSH protocol, so
+you must first install the SSH client. Then, you should set your
+CVS_RSH environment variable to ssh, and use the following as your CVS
+root:
+
+ :ext:USER@egcs.cygnus.com:/egcs/carton/cvsfiles
+
+Either set your CVSROOT environment variable to that, or give it as
+the value of the global -d option to CVS when you check out a working
+directory.
+
+For more information on SSH, see http://www.cs.hut.fi/ssh.
+
+The Guile sources live in several modules:
+
+ - guile-core --- the interpreter, QuickThreads, and ice-9
+ - guile-doc --- documentation in progress. When complete, this will
+ be incorporated into guile-core.
+ - guile-tcltk --- the Guile/Tk interface
+ - guile-tk --- the new Guile/Tk interface, based on STk's modified Tk
+ - guile-rgx-ctax --- the Guile/Rx interface, and the ctax implementation
+ - guile-scsh --- the port of SCSH to guile, talk to Gary Houston
+ - guile-comp --- the Hobbit compiler (talk to mdj)
+ - guile-emacs --- Guile/Emacs interface (talk to mdj)
+ - guile-oops --- The Guile Object-Oriented Programming System (talk to mdj)
+ - guile-www --- A Guile module for making HTTP requests.
+
+- We check Makefile.in and configure files into CVS, as well as the
+files they are built from (Makefile.am, configure.in); we do not check
+in Makefiles or header files generated by configuration scripts. The
general rule is that you should be able to check out a working
-directory of Guile from CVS, and then type "configure" and "make".
+directory of Guile from CVS, and then type "configure" and "make",
+without running any other tools.
- Make sure your changes compile and work, at least on your own
machine, before checking them into the main branch of the Guile
repository. If you really need to check in untested changes, make a
branch.
+- Include each log entry in both the ChangeLog and in the CVS logs.
+If you're using Emacs, the pcl-cvs interface to CVS has features to
+make this easier; it checks the ChangeLog, and generates good default
+CVS log entries from that.
+
+
+Coding standards =====================================================
+
+- As for any part of Project GNU, changes to Guile should follow the
+GNU coding standards. The standards are available via anonymous FTP
+from prep.ai.mit.edu, as /pub/gnu/standards/standards.texi and
+make-stds.texi.
+
+- The Guile tree should compile without warnings under the following
+GCC switches, which are the default in the current configure script:
+ -O2 -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wmissing-prototypes
+The only exceptions are the warnings about variables being clobbered
+by longjmp/vfork in eval.c. (Tho' if you can figure out how to get
+rid of those, too, I'd be happy.)
+
+Note that the warnings generated vary from one version of GCC to the
+next, and from one architecture to the next (apparently). To provide
+a concrete common standard, Guile should compile without warnings from
+GCC 2.7.2.3 in a Red Hat 5.0 i386 Linux machine. Furthermore, each
+developer should pursue any additional warnings noted by on their
+compiler. This means that people using more stringent compilers will
+have more work to do, and assures that everyone won't switch to the
+most lenient compiler they can find. :)
+
- When you make a user-visible change (i.e. one that should be
documented, and appear in NEWS, put an asterisk in column zero of the
start of the ChangeLog entry, like so:
ahead and remove the asterisk. I will use the asterisks to find and
document changes that haven't been dealt with before a release.
-- Include each log entry in both the ChangeLog and in the CVS logs.
-If you're using Emacs, the pcl-cvs interface to CVS has features to
-make this easier; it checks the ChangeLog, and generates good default
-CVS log entries from that.
-
- There's no need to keep a change log for documentation files. This
is because documentation is not susceptible to bugs that are hard to
fix. Documentation does not consist of parts that must interact in a
the history of the erroneous passage. (This is copied from the GNU
coding standards.)
-- If you add or remove files, don't forget to update the appropriate
-part of the relevant Makefile.am files, and regenerate the
-Makefile.in. If you forget this, the snapshot and distribution
-processes will not work.
-
- Make sure you have papers from people before integrating their
changes or contributions. This is very frustrating, but very
important to do right. From maintain.texi, "Information for
the list of years in the copyright notice at the top of the file.
+Helpful hints ========================================================
+
+- [From Mikael Djurfeldt] When working on the Guile internals, it is
+quite often practical to implement a scheme-level procedure which
+helps you examine the feature you're working on.
+
+Examples of such procedures are: pt-size, debug-hand and
+current-pstate.
+
+I've now put #ifdef GUILE_DEBUG around all such procedures, so that
+they are not compiled into the "normal" Guile library. Please do the
+same when you add new procedures/C functions for debugging purpose.
+
+You can define the GUILE_DEBUG flag by passing --enable-guile-debug to
+the configure script.
+
+- You'll see uses of the macro SCM_P scattered throughout the code;
+those are vestiges of a time when Guile was meant to compile on
+pre-ANSI compilers. Guile now requires ANSI C, so when you write new
+functions, feel free to use ANSI declarations, and please provide
+prototypes for everything.
+
+
Jim Blandy
HCoop / bpt / guile.git / blobdiff