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 - 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 - bump the version number up in configure.in, and commit it. Make sure you do this *after* tagging the previous release! - 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@lists.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. DBUS_TEST_MALLOC_FAILURES=n Many of the D-BUS tests will run over and over, once for each malloc involved in the test. Each run will fail a different malloc, plus some number of mallocs following that malloc (because a fair number of bugs only happen if two or more mallocs fail in a row, e.g. error recovery that itself involves malloc). This env variable sets the number of mallocs to fail. Here's why you care: If set to 0, then the malloc checking is skipped, which makes the test suite a heck of a lot faster. Just run with this env variable unset before you commit. 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, Colin Walters.