gimp/HACKING

Requirements
------------
If you want to hack on the GIMP project, it will make you life easier
to have the following packages installed:

	- GNU autoconf 2.13
	- GNU automake 1.4
	- GNU libtool 1.2d
	- GNU gettext 10.35
		Available in ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu


These should be available by ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu or any of the
fine GNU mirrors.  Beta software can be found at alpha.gnu.org.


Compilation
-----------
If you are accessing gimp via CVS, then you will need to take several
steps to get it to compile.  You can do all these steps at once
by running:

        cvsroot/gimp# ./autogen.sh

Basically this does the following for you:

        cvsroot/gimp# aclocal; automake; autoconf

        The above commands create the "configure" script.  Now you
        can run the configure script in cvsroot/gimp to create all
        the Makefiles.

Before running autogen.sh or configure, make sure you have libtool
in your path. Also make sure gtk.m4 is in the same --prefix relative
to your automake installation.

Note that autogen.sh runs configure for you.  If you wish to pass
options like --prefix=/usr to configure you can give those options
to autogen.sh and they will be passed on to configure.


CVS
---
If at all possible, please use CVS to get the latest development version of
gimp, as well as the CVS version of gtk+.  You can do the following to get
gimp and gtk+ from cvs:

   $ export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gimp.org:/cvs/gnome'
   $ cvs login
     (there is no password, just hit return)
   $ cvs -z3 checkout gtk+ gimp


Patches
-------
Please submit patches to the gimp-developer@scam.xcf.berkeley.edu mailing
list.  All kinds of contributions are accepted.  Patches that you wish to go
into the distribution should also be uploaded to ftp://ftp.gimp.org/incoming.
Follow the rules there for naming your patches.


Autogenerated Files
-------------------
Please notice that some files in the source are generated from other sources. 
All those files have a short notice about being autogenerated somewhere at 
the top. Among them are the files ending in _pdb.[ch] in the libgimp 
directory and the files ending in _cmds.c in the app/pdb subdirectory. Those 
are generated from the respective .pdb files in tools/pdbgen/pdb. The list of
contributors is used in several files which are for that reason generated 
from the file contributors in tools/authorsgen.


Hackordnung
-----------
We encourage you to follow the GIMP coding style throughout the GIMP project. 
For the core components (application and libs) this coding style is enforced. 
The GIMP coding style is defined as follows:

  Function names are lowercase, words separated by underscores.
  Macros and enums are all uppercase, words seperated by underscores.
  Types are all words capitalized, no separators between words.

  All functions in header files need to be prototyped.

  Indentation rules are GNU coding style, in particular:
    - 2 characters indentation level
    - Do not use tabs (of course your editor can use tabs, but it 
      should write them to file as 8 spaces each).
    - Opening brackets are on a new line and indented one level.
    - Function header have the return type on one line, the name starting
      in the first column of the following line. All parameters are 
      prototyped and there's a new line for each.

Try to make use of GTK's object system as much as possible. Do not create 
wrappers around functions of parent classes. If you end up duplicating code, 
try to create a common parent class and implement the common methods there.

Don't include headers in headers except where unavoidable (e.g. for
deriving objects). Opaque typedefs go to app/apptypes.h

One goal of the 1.3 development branch is to make the GIMP code more readable
and understandable. Please help us to achieve this goal by cleaning up the
present code and make sure that all new code follows the coding guidelines.