The OpenHPI Project

As OpenHPI is an open source project, it is important that a set of style guidelines and standards exist. Without this, the project very quickly will turn into a pile of mud that is undecypherable by anyone. This page lists the contributor guidelines for the OpenHPI project. Adherence to these guidelines will ensure a much more robust OpenHPI project.

From day one OpenHPI has adopted the Linux Kernel Coding Style guidelines as the base for it's style. For the convenience of our developers and users, this document is reproduced on our website. One should read it thoroughly before continuing. All patches must comply to those guidelines.

There are certain other items not specified in those guidelines that the OpenHPI team has standardized on. The first is return values from functions. In the grand C tradition, return of 0 indicates sucess, return of < 0 indicates failure.

The second is function level documentation. OpenHPI has adopted the gtk/gnome-doc format for function headers. This should be included before any function in the code. An example follows:

/**
 * function_name
 * @firstparameter: This is the first parameter
 * @secondparameter: This is the second parameter
 *
 * This is the description of the function. Note the blank lines that separate it
 * from the parameter list above and the return value explanation below.
 *
 * Return value: 0 on success, otherwise any negative value on failure.
 **/
int function_name(sometype firstparameter, anothertype secondparameter)
{
    ...
}