Developer Guidelines

1. guidelines for developers of this projects.

Guidelines for Developers

Commits

When making commits to this project, please follow these guidelines:

• Make commits *as granular as possible*, do not mix several issues or topics in one commit. This makes reverts and merges easier if a change causes problems.
• For each functional change *an issue should exists* in the issue tracker which describes the motivation or need for the change. This is not necessary for changes on coding style or minimal fixes.
• The *commit message should contain the issue number* and a brief one sentence description of the change. More details can be added to the issue.

Coding Style

When writing or changing code in this project, please follow these guidelines:

• As a general rule always examine the surrounding code of your modification to keep the consistent style as much as possible.
• Indent blocks with two spaces. Tab character is not allowed.
• Capitalization matters. Pascal is not case sensitive but that doesn't mean we should use the Shift key randomly. Hungarian notation style should only be used on enumerated values. Reserved words are all lowercased.
• One statement per line. No statement is allowed after the *`then`* or *`else`* keywords within the same line.
• Every statement should be closed by a semicolon even if it is not mandatory before the *`end`* keyword.
• There should be no whitespace before the semicolons. There is one space after the semicolon in the parameter list.
• Operators: one space before and after the operators (even at the assignment operator).
• Variable declaration: one space after the colon (`Variable: Variant;`). One variable per line. Variable grouping (same type) should only be used in function parameters. Example:

procedure Procedure1(const Caption: string; X, Y: Integer; var ForceUpdate: Boolean);
var
  I: Integer;
  J: Integer;
  Temp: string;
begin
  Now;
end;

• Brackets: no space after the opening `(` or `[` and no space before the closing `)` or `]`. Avoid brackets if there is only one condition. Example:

if I < 0 then
  Procedure1
else
  while AllowDecrementOfI and (I > 0) do
    Dec(I);

• The following keywords are standing on their own (no character should be written before or after them other than whitespace):
• asm, begin, else, end, finalization, finally, implementation, initialization, repeat, resourcestring, threadvar, try, uses* Example:

if Condition then
begin
  Procedure1;
  Procedure2
end
else
  Procedure3;

• Make the code navigation-friendly: explicitly declare the ancestor in *`class`* declaration even if it is the TObject and write the method name after the *`inherited`* keyword in overridden methods. Example:

destructor TForm1.Destroy;
begin
  inherited Destroy;
end;