Next Previous Contents

5. Good development practice

Most of these are concerned with ensuring portability, not only across Linuxes but to other Unixes as well. Being portable to other Unixes is not just a worthy form of professionalism and hackerly politeness, it's valuable insurance against future changes in Linux itself.

Finally, other people will try to build your code on non-Linux systems; portability minimizes the number of annoying perplexed email messages you will get.

5.1 Write either pure ANSI C or a portable scripting language

For portability and stability, you should write either in ANSI C or a scripting language that is guaranteed portable because it has just one cross-platform implementation.

Scripting languages that qualify include Python, Perl, Tcl, and Emacs Lisp. Plain old shell does not qualify; there are too many different implementations with subtle idiosyncracies, and the shell environment is subject to disruption by user customizations such as shell aliases.

Java holds promise as a portable language, but the Linux-available implementations are still scratchy and poorly integrated with Linux. Java is still a bleeding-edge choice, though one likely to become more popular as it matures.

5.2 Follow good C portability practices

If you are writing C, do feel free to use the full ANSI features -- including function prototypes, which will help you spot cross-module inconsistancies. The old-style K&R compilers are history.

On the other hand, do not assume that GCC-specific features such as the `-pipe' option or nested functions are available. These will come around and bite you the second somebody ports to a non-Linux, non-GCC system.

5.3 Use autoconf/automake/autoheader

If you're writing C, use autoconf/automake/autoheader to handle portability issues, do system-configuration probes, and tailor your makefiles. People building from sources today expect to be able to type "configure; make" and get a clean build -- and rightly so.

5.4 Sanity-check your code before release

If you're writing C, test-compile with -Wall and clean up the errors at least once before each release. This catches a surprising number of errors. For real thoroughness, compile with -pedantic as well.

If you're writing Perl, check your code with perl -c (and maybe -T, if applicable). Use perl -w and 'use strict' religiously. (See the Perl documentation for discussion.)

5.5 Sanity-check your documentation and READMEs before release

Run a spell-checker on them. If you look like you can't spell and don't care, pleople will assume you code is sloppy and careless too.


Next Previous Contents