CONTRIBUTING.md

This file contains a few simple general rules for keeping code clean, which are not difficult to apply and save a lot of effort later. Please, read all points and try to follow.

1. Do not use TABs, under any circumstances. Set your editor to automatically convert them to spaces.

2. Make sensible indentation. Do not use TABs.

3. Within reason, try to follow the coding style of the code already present in the repository, i.e., the same kind of indentation (number of spaces), the same way of inserting newlines, etc.

4. As a general rule, avoid copy & paste. Instead, abstract out a more general parameterised function.

5. Try to make commits which include only things directly relevant to what you're changing. Do not make changes which do nothing (which don't change the behaviour of the code), unless your commit is explicitly about refactoring (cleaning up) code. Avoid including outcommented code, changes of parameters you just used for debugging, hardcoded paths, etc.

   Hint: use git diff to review your changes before committing.

6. Try to split commits that do many unrelated things into several commits, each doing one thing. Splitting commits might not always be worth the effort, but it's always worth trying to do this and to keep it in mind. Then the diffs are easy to read, and you can easily find what was changed when and for what purpose.

7. Remove unused code, don't comment it out. With git you can always go back, and really removing things shows up on diffs.

8. When starting on a new thing make a branch (git branch, git checkout -b) from the most recent development version for a stable version of Coq. This will be in one of the coq8.X branches (ask if not sure). This is never the master branch. Branching out from master is bad because the master branch is synchronised with the most recent unstable development version of Coq, which constantly changes and you're then suddenly no longer able to compile things you wrote a few days/weeks/months ago.