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| Contributing to OpenSlide | |
| ========================= | |
| Adam Goode, June 2010 | |
| This document is for any contributors to OpenSlide, including those in | |
| the original OpenSlide group at CMU. It includes some guidelines and | |
| advice. | |
| * Please do not add new API calls without careful thought. Absolutely | |
| don't add API as unimplemented stubs "just in case". OpenSlide so | |
| far has been backward compatible in terms of ABI, and part of this | |
| comes from carefully adding new API only as needed. Removing a bad | |
| API will come at the cost of binary compatibility. | |
| I was able to effectively remove the prefetch API without breaking | |
| ABI by making it a compile time error to link against it, but this | |
| was only because the API calls were stubs and never implemented and | |
| never used. Having these unimplemented stubs was a bad idea because | |
| while the code was unimplemented, no user could possibly test the | |
| performance implications of using the prefetch; and if we ever | |
| actually implemented something it would likely hurt performance of | |
| any user who might have sprinkled prefetch statements around and | |
| noticed no performance issues with it. | |
| * Make sure things build on Windows, at least with MinGW. Many users | |
| of OpenSlide are on Windows. Keep in mind the differences between ELF | |
| and COFF shared libraries, they can get you. This is especially | |
| important when an OpenSlide API might consume or return a structure | |
| from a DLL that OpenSlide links to, in general this is unsafe on Windows. | |
| * When making a release, try to carefully follow the libtool | |
| and automake versioning rules. Also add a changelog entry, update | |
| the website, and post to the announce mailing list. | |
| * Try to follow the coding style of nearby code. | |
| * Follow the GError rules for reporting errors. | |
| * Maintain thread safety. The openslide_t struct is mostly immutable, | |
| except for the cache (which takes locks) and libtiff (which is sort | |
| of a disaster). | |
| * Avoid the midlayer mistake. The grid helpers and cache are there for | |
| you. | |
| * Have fun! Graphics are a joy. |