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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Good Development Practices for Open-Source Developers

Don't rely on proprietary code, languages, or libraries. Open-source developers don't trust code for which they can't review the source.Use GNU Autotools autoconf, autoheader, automake. Configuration choices should be made at compile time. People building from sources today expect to be able to type configure; make; make install and get a clean build. The software must be able to determine for

Monday, December 12, 2005

Design Rules for Textual Data Formats

Another set of rules from Eric Raymonds excellent "The Art of Unix Programming". Use textual data format instead of binary to store or transport your data:Easy for human beings to read, write, and edit without specialized tools.Easy to prepare test data and to debug.Future-proof your system. One specific reason is that ranges on numeric fields aren't implied by the format itself.Other tools and

Monday, December 5, 2005

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

From Eric Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" i picked here the 17 rules described as the Basics of the Unix Philosophy. For me these are also rules for writing high quality software:Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected with other programs.Rule of Separation: