HACKING

Bug tracking system
===================

Thunar uses the Xfce bug tracking system at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/,
hosted and maintained by the Xfce project.


Patches
=======

Please submit patches to the Xfce bug tracking system or to the thunar-dev
mailinglist. Your patch should be in unified diff format (the -u option
to GNU diff) and it must comply with the coding style described below.

Please send a patch against a recent version of this package. Patches
against the Git master branch are most preferable. You can always
clone the Thunar repository from

  http://git.xfce.org/git/xfce/thunar


Feature requests
================

Please file feature requests to the Xfce bug tracking system
(http://buzilla.xfce.org, product Thunar) with a Severity of
enhancement. Make sure that your feature request wasn't reported
already before; requesting a feature several times won't increase
the changed that it gets added!


Coding Style
============

 - GNU coding conventions, with GLib-like extensions, mostly the same
   as GTK+.
 - Always expand tabs. This differs from the GNU suggestion, but it is
   necessary to be independent from a given tab setting.
 - Do NOT ever misuse debugging macros like g_return_val_if_fail() or
   g_return_if_fail() to control program flow. They are solely useful
   to discover bugs, the final binary won't include code for these
   statements, and so any use of these macros to control program
   flow presents a bug!
 - Do NOT follow the philosophy "If it works, it's right" that most
   other open source projects follow, instead Thunar's philosophy is
   "It doesn't work unless it's right". Think carefully of what you want
   to do, don't just fire up your favourite editor and start hacking
   in the hope that it will evolve into something useful one day.
 - Maintainability goes over performance. If you have to choose between
   a maintainable and a fast solution, always prefer the former, as it's
   quite easy to optimize well-designed modules, but very hard and costly
   to make spaghetti-code readable.
 - Write ChangeLog entries. Whenever you commit a change or send a patch,
   write a good entry per change to the ChangeLog file, see the libexo
   ChangeLog for the exact format; it's very important to be descriptive
   and correct here, else you'll loose your commit bits or your patches
   won't be considered for inclusion.
 - Use GObject whenever possible. Object-oriented design and programming
   makes it easier to separate functionality and also aids in verification
   and testing, and GObject provides a very solid base.


Release process
===============

Yet to be defined!