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CONTRIBUTING.md

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re2c was written in 1993 by Peter Bumbulis. Since then it has been maintained and developed by multiple volunteers. Contributions are welcome, please have a look at the guidelines below.

Contributions

The preferred form of a contribution is a pull request on GitHub. Patches sent by email are also fine (but less convenient). Discussion in GitHub issues is welcome. Email threads are also fine (but less convenient).

Language guidelines

re2c is written in C++ (the current standard is C++11). The algorithms and mathematical concepts used in the code are quite complex, so the code itself should stay simple and let the developer focus on the underlying logic, without the language getting in the way. For example, try to avoid complex object hierarchies and excessive use of template metaprogramming.

The line length limit is 100 characters, indentation is 4 spaces, and the indentation style is egyptian (the opening brace is on the same line). This is the approximate astyle command to auto-format re2c source code (it requires manual tweaking for argument/initializer lists and multiline comments):

$ # run in source directory
$ astyle --style=google \
         --max-code-length=100 \
         --align-pointer=type \
         --align-reference=type \
         --keep-one-line-statements \
         --suffix=none \
         --recursive '*'

Regenerating bootstrap files

By default re2c uses bootstrap files for autogenerated sources (lexers, parsers, docs) and does not attempt to regenerate them. Developers may need to enable "regeneration mode" if they modify the corresponding source files.

For changes that affect lexers (.re files), regeneration mode is configured with options --enable-lexers (Autotools) or -DRE2C_REBUILD_LEXERS=ON (CMake). RE2C_FOR_BUILD should be defined as a path to an existing re2c executable that will be used to regenerate the lexers.

For changes that affect parsers (.ypp files), regeneration mode is configured with options --enable-parsers (Autotools) or -DRE2C_REBUILD_PARSERS=ON (CMake). In this case bison must be installed on the system, otherwise Autoconf or CMake will fail at cconfiguration stage.

For changes that update documentation, it is necessary to rebuild the bootstrap manpages by reconfiguring and rebuilding re2c with options --enable-docs (Autotools) or -DRE2C_REBUILD_DOCS=ON (CMake).

Please do not commit trivial updates to the bootstrap files, such as changes of the generator version or generation date.

Commit messages

The headline should use present tense and start with a capital letter. Commit messages should be as descriptive as possible and avoid uncertain terms like "fix", "refactoring", "code cleanup" and so on. Long commit messages with explanations, examples and test instructions are welcome.

Unrelated changes should be split into multiple commits.