This article contains several guidelines and suggestions for Gnome programmers, as well as certain policies that should be followed when writing Gnome programs. This is intended for programmers to know about Gnome's development process and its philosophy. Gnome is a team effort, so it will be useful for programmers to know "the way things are done". Think of this document not as a book of laws, but rather as a manual of etiquette for writing legible code that an be maintained by large, diverse teams over a long period of time.
This guide has a two-fold purpose:
To give you good suggestions on how to write code for Gnome. This will help you write code that is consistent with Gnome's practices, and that is well-accepted by the members of the Gnome community. This will also lead to code that is a pleasure to work on.
To transmit the knowledge we have gotten over the years on how to keep the Gnome project sustainable, even when people's contributions increase or decrease.
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