tor/doc/HACKING

1. Coding conventions

1.1. Details

  Use tor_malloc, tor_free, tor_snprintf, tor_strdup, and tor_gettimeofday
  instead of their generic equivalents.  (They always succeed or exit.)

  Use INLINE instead of 'inline', so that we work properly on windows.

1.2. Calling and naming conventions

  Whenever possible, functions should return -1 on error and and 0 on
  success.

  For multi-word identifiers, use lowercase words combined with
  underscores. (e.g., "multi_word_identifier").  Use ALL_CAPS for macros and
  constants.

  Typenames should end with "_t".

  Function names should be prefixed with a module name or object name.  (In
  general, code to manipulate an object should be a module with the same
  name as the object, so it's hard to tell which convention is used.)

  Functions that do things should have imperative-verb names
  (e.g. buffer_clear, buffer_resize); functions that return booleans should
  have predicate names (e.g. buffer_is_empty, buffer_needs_resizing).

1.3. What To Optimize

  Don't optimize anything if it's not in the critical path.  Right now,
  the critical path seems to be AES, logging, and the network itself.
  Feel free to do your own profiling to determine otherwise.

1.4. Log conventions

  Log convention: use only these four log severities.

    ERR is if something fatal just happened.
    WARN if something bad happened, but we're still running. The
      bad thing is either a bug in the code, an attack or buggy
      protocol/implementation of the remote peer, etc. The operator should
      examine the bad thing and try to correct it.
    NOTICE if it's something the operator will want to know about.
    (No error or warning messages should be expected during normal OR or OP
      operation. I expect most people to run on -l notice eventually. If a
      library function is currently called such that failure always means
      ERR, then the library function should log WARN and let the caller
      log ERR.)
    INFO means something happened (maybe bad, maybe ok), but there's nothing
      you need to (or can) do about it.
    DEBUG is for everything louder than INFO.

  [XXX Proposed convention: every messages of severity INFO or higher should
  either (A) be intelligible to end-users who don't know the Tor source; or
  (B) somehow inform the end-users that they aren't expected to understand
  the message (perhaps with a string like "internal error").  Option (A) is
  to be preferred to option (B). -NM]

1.5. Doxygen

  We use the 'doxygen' utility to generate documentation from our source code.
  Here's how to use it:

  1. Begin every file that should be documented with
         /**
          * \file filename.c
          * \brief Short desccription of the file.
          **/

     (Doxygen will recognize any comment beginning with /** as special.)

  2. Before any function, structure, #define, or variable you want to
     document, add a comment of the form:

        /** Describe the function's actions in imperative sentences.
         *
         * Use blank lines for paragraph breaks
         *   - and
         *   - hyphens
         *   - for
         *   - lists.
         *
         * Write <b>argument_names</b> in boldface.
         *
         * \code
         *     place_example_code();
         *     between_code_and_endcode_commands();
         * \endcode
         */

  3. Make sure to escape the characters "<", ">", "\", "%" and "#" as "\<",
     "\>", "\\", "\%", and "\#".

  4. To document structure members, you can use two forms:

       struct foo {
         /** You can put the comment before an element; */
         int a;
         int b; /**< Or use the less-than symbol to put the comment after the element. */
       };

  5. To generate documentation from the Tor source code, type:

     $ doxygen -g

     To generate a file called 'Doxyfile'.  Edit that file and run 'doxygen' to
     generate the API documentation.

  6. See the Doxygen manual for more information; this summary just scratches
     the surface.