path: root/HACKING

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

 - scp your tarball to freedesktop.org server and copy it 
   to /srv/dbus.freedesktop.org/releases. This should 
   be possible if you're in group "dbus"

 - update the wiki page http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/dbus by
   adding the new release under the Download heading. Then, cut the
   link and changelog for the previous that was there.

 - update the wiki page
   http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/DbusReleaseArchive pasting the
   previous release. Note that bullet points for each of the changelog
   items must be indented three more spaces to conform to the
   formatting of the other releases there.
  
 - post to dbus@freedesktop.org announcing the release.
 

Environment variables
===

These are the environment variables that are used by the D-BUS client library

DBUS_VERBOSE=1
Turns on printing verbose messages. This only works if D-BUS has been
compiled with --enable-verbose-mode

DBUS_MALLOC_FAIL_NTH=n
Can be set to a number, causing every nth call to dbus_alloc or
dbus_realloc to fail. This only works if D-BUS has been compiled with
--enable-tests.

DBUS_MALLOC_FAIL_GREATER_THAN=n
Can be set to a number, causing every call to dbus_alloc or
dbus_realloc to fail if the number of bytes to be allocated is greater
than the specified number. This only works if D-BUS has been compiled with
--enable-tests.

Tests
===

These are the test programs that are built if dbus is compiled using
--enable-tests.

dbus/dbus-test
This is the main unit test program that tests all aspects of the D-BUS
client library.

dbus/bus-test
This it the unit test program for the message bus.

test/break-loader
A test that tries to break the message loader by passing it randomly
created invalid messages.

"make check" runs all the deterministic test programs (i.e. not break-loader).

"make check-coverage" is available if you configure with --enable-gcov and 
gives a complete report on test suite coverage. You can also run 
"test/decode-gcov foo.c" on any source file to get annotated source, 
after running make check with a gcov-enabled tree.

Patches
===

Please file them at http://bugzilla.freedesktop.org under component
dbus, and also post to the mailing list for discussion.  The commit
rules are:

 - for fixes that don't affect API or protocol, they can be committed
   if any one qualified reviewer other than patch author
   reviews and approves

 - for fixes that do affect API or protocol, two people
   in the reviewer group have to review and approve the commit, and 
   posting to the list is definitely mandatory

 - if there's a live unresolved controversy about a change,
   don't commit it while the argument is still raging.

 - regardless of reviews, to commit a patch:
    - make check must pass
    - the test suite must be extended to cover the new code
      as much as reasonably feasible
    - the patch has to follow the portability, security, and 
      style guidelines
    - the patch should as much as reasonable do one thing, 
      not many unrelated changes
   No reviewer should approve a patch without these attributes, and
   failure on these points is grounds for reverting the patch.

The reviewer group that can approve patches: Havoc Pennington, Michael
Meeks, Alex Larsson, Zack Rusin, Joe Shaw, Mikael Hallendal, Richard
Hult, Owen Fraser-Green, Olivier Andrieu.