3 Contribution Guidelines

Thanks for taking your time to contribute! To maintain stylistic behaviour throughout the repositories, one must adhere to these guidelines. Exceptions and changes may occur with good reasoning.

3.1 General Conventions – GN

These apply to each and every file on the repositories.

• Try to keep the file readable. [GN0010]
  • Characters on a line shouldn’t exceed 100 characters excluding indentation. [GN0011]
  • Make sure you don’t have code commented out during commit. Uncomment them or remove them completely. [GN0012]
  • Do not add comments following the code, add them to the top of the code. It makes it harder to read, and lines longer. [GN0013] Here is an example:

    # Good way of commenting.
    your code goes here
    
    your code goes here  # Avoid this way of commenting.
    

3.2 Shell conventions – SH

Shell is central to Carbs Linux projects. Most of the tools and packages are written in POSIX sh.

• Use 4 spaces for indentation, instead of tabs. [SH0010]
• Make sure you don’t use bash-specific code. [SH0020]
• Make sure you lint your code with shellcheck and if you are new to POSIX sh, use checkbashisms. [SH0030]
• Don’t spawn new processes if you don’t absolutely need to, especially during string manipulation. [SH0040]
  • Never use a program for text manupilation that isn’t defined in the POSIX standard. This includes gawk and perl. [SH0041]
  • Instead of $(basename $file), use ${file##*}. [SH0042]
  • Instead of $(dirname $file), use ${file%/*}. [SH0043]

  # This is the same thing as basename /path/to/test.asc .asc
  
  $ file=/path/to/test.asc file=${file##*/} file=${file%.asc}
  $ echo $file
  test
  

• Instead of backticks, use $(..). [SH0050]