rts/doc/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Overview

rts strives to run on a wide variety of platforms, including low-end and old hardware, such as PSX or even i486 computers. This is possible thanks to the use of portable source code and the wide availability of sdl-1.2. However, rts should be easy to extend to other platforms.

License

As stated on the project license, rts is licensed by the GNU General Public License, either version 3 of the license, or later. Anyone contributing their own source code to this project must adhere to this license. Also, only source code from other projects compatible with the project license is allowed.

C language revision

Because of C11 not being available for the i386-mingw32 toolchain, C99 is the selected language revision for this project. On the other hand, feel free to use any helpful C99 features.

Compiler extensions

Avoid compiler-specific extensions unless absolutely needed. While this project is currently built using the GNU toolchain, those using other compilers might appreciate not having to deal with such extensions.

Platform-specific code

Separate platform-agnostic code from platform-specific code. The usual method used by this project is to separate platform-specific code into its own directory. Please, do not use macros for this purpose, since they make code more difficult to read and maintain.

This is the typical tree structure of a module:

module_name/
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── inc
│   └── file.h
├── privinc
│   └── file.h
├── ps1
│   ├── inc
│   │   └── module_name
│   │       └── file.h
│   ├── privinc
│   │   └── ps1
│   │       └── file.h
│   └── src
│       └── file.c
└── sdl-1.2
    ├── inc
    │   └── module_name
    │       └── file.h
    ├── privinc
    │   └── sdl-1.2
    │       └── file.h
    └── src
        └── file.c

Where:

• src holds the source files defining the implementation of a given module.
• inc holds public header files accessible to other modules.
• privinc holds public header files accessible to other modules.
• ps1 and sdl-1.2 are two of the platforms supported by this project.

C code conventions

• Use Allman style for brackets.
• Strive for maximum const-correctness.
• Keep a hard 80-column limit.