Contributing guidelines

When submitting pull requests

• Explain your thinking in why a change or addition is needed.

  • Is it a requested change or feature?
  • If not, open a feature request to get feedback before making a pull request.

• Split up multiple unrelated changes in multiple pull requests.

• Shellcheck your work. Current shellsheck exceptions at the beginning of bashtop.

• Purely cosmetic changes won't be accepted without a very good explanation of its value.

  • (Some design choices are for better configurability of syntax highlighting.)

Formatting

Follow the current syntax design

• Indent type: Tabs

• Tab size: 4

• Use the longer "if, elif, then, else, fi" statements and indent conditionals, loops etc.

• Use "[[ ]]", "(( ))" for conditions and "$( ), <( )" for command substitution.

• Create functions instead of repeating blocks of code.

• Don't stack unrelated blocks of code, leave blank lines for better readability.

• Comment new code that isn't very obvious in it's function.

• Name new variables and functions in lower-case and after what purpose they serve.

  • (Exception arithmetic with many variables, make sure to comment what's happening instead.)

Optimization

• Avoid forks if possible.

• Avoid writing to disk if possible.

• Make sure variables/arrays are cleaned up if not reused.

• Compare cpu and memory usage with and without your code and look for alternatives if they cause a noticeable negative impact.

For questions contact Aristocratos at admin@qvantnet.com

For proposing changes to this document create a new issue.