HACKING

How to contribute to Devhelp
============================

Devhelp is hosted on the GNOME GitLab instance, you can fork the repository and
then do a merge request:

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/devhelp

Read the following wiki page to know the conventions for the commit messages:

    https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/CommitMessages

C code conventions
------------------

Devhelp follows the Linux kernel coding style, with some exceptions:
- Indentation: 8 spaces, not tabs.
- One space before *each* opening parenthesis.
- Multi-line comments must be like this:
        /* First line.
         * Second line.
         */

GObject classes must not be created with a G_DECLARE macro, it causes more
problems than it solves:
https://blogs.gnome.org/swilmet/2015/10/10/changing-quickly-between-a-final-and-derivable-gobject-class/

g_auto macros are not used, because:
1. It makes debugging more difficult in case of a memory handling problem.
2. It breaks the uniformity of memory handling in C. Uniformity is an important
   principle for programming language design, as explained in the book
   “The Psychology of Computer Programming”:
   https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Computer-Programming-Silver-Anniversary/dp/0932633420/
3. The developer needs to be very careful when using g_auto in certain
   circumstances:
   https://blog.fishsoup.net/2015/11/05/attributecleanup-mixed-declarations-and-code-and-goto/

See also:
https://developer.gnome.org/programming-guidelines/unstable/

Flatpak
-------

The Devhelp maintainers maintain both the nightly and the stable versions of
the Devhelp Flatpak.

The nightly version is in flatpak/ and the gnome-apps-nightly module:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-apps-nightly

The stable version is on Flathub:
https://github.com/flathub/org.gnome.Devhelp