The guidelines in this file are the ideals; it's better to send a not-fully-following-guidelines patch than no patch at all, though. We can always polish it up. Mailing list === The D-BUS mailing list is message-bus-list@freedesktop.org; discussion of patches, etc. should go there. Security === Most of D-BUS is security sensitive. Guidelines related to that: - avoid memcpy(), sprintf(), strlen(), snprintf, strlcat(), strstr(), strtok(), or any of this stuff. Use DBusString. If DBusString doesn't have the feature you need, add it to DBusString. There are some exceptions, for example if your strings are just used to index a hash table and you don't do any parsing/modification of them, perhaps DBusString is wasteful and wouldn't help much. But definitely if you're doing any parsing, reallocation, etc. use DBusString. - do not include system headers outside of dbus-memory.c, dbus-sysdeps.c, and other places where they are already included. This gives us one place to audit all external dependencies on features in libc, etc. - do not use libc features that are "complicated" and may contain security holes. For example, you probably shouldn't try to use regcomp() to compile an untrusted regular expression. Regular expressions are just too complicated, and there are many different libc's out there. - we need to design the message bus daemon (and any similar features) to use limited privileges, run in a chroot jail, and so on. http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ has other good security suggestions. Coding Style === - The C library uses GNU coding conventions, with GLib-like extensions (e.g. lining up function arguments). The Qt wrapper uses KDE coding conventions. - Write docs for all non-static functions and structs and so on. try "doxygen Doxyfile" prior to commit and be sure there are no warnings printed. - All external interfaces (network protocols, file formats, etc.) should have documented specifications sufficient to allow an alternative implementation to be written. Our implementation should be strict about specification compliance (should not for example heuristically parse a file and accept not-well-formed data). Avoiding heuristics is also important for security reasons; if it looks funny, ignore it (or exit, or disconnect). Making a release === To make a release of D-BUS, do the following: - check out a fresh copy from CVS - increment the version number in configure.in - verify that the libtool versioning/library soname is changed if it needs to be, or not changed if not - update the file NEWS based on the ChangeLog - add a ChangeLog entry containing the version number you're releasing ("Released 0.3" or something) so people can see which changes were before and after a given release. - "make distcheck" (DO NOT just "make dist" - pass the check!) - if make distcheck fails, fix it. - once distcheck succeeds, "cvs commit" - if someone else made changes and the commit fails, you have to "cvs up" and run "make distcheck" again - once the commit succeeds, "cvs tag DBUS_X_Y_Z" where X_Y_Z map to version X.Y.Z - check out the "web" module, copy the tarball to web/content/software/dbus/releases, "cvs add -kb dbus-x.y.z.tar.gz" - update web/content/software/dbus/main.in with a pointer to the tarball - post to message-bus-list@freedesktop.org announcing the release.