#ifndef DOXYGEN_SKIP
/* $Id: RFC8_DEVGUIDE.dox 10534 2006-12-30 15:51:10Z fwarmerdam $ */
#endif /* DOXYGEN_SKIP */
/*!
\page rfc8_devguide RFC 8: Developer Guidelines
Author: Frank Warmerdam
Contact: warmerdam@pobox.com
Status: draft
\section rfc8_purpose Purpose
This document is intended to document developer practices for the GDAL/OGR
project. It will be an evolving document.
\section rfc8_port Portability
GDAL strives to be widely portable to 32bit and 64bit computing environments.
It accomplishes this in a number of ways - avoid compiler specific directives,
avoiding new, but perhaps not widely available aspects of C++, and most
importantly by abstracting platform specific operations in CPL functions
in the gdal/port directory.
Generally speaking, where available CPL functions should be used in preference
to operating system functions for operations like memory allocation,
path parsing, filesystem io, multithreading functions, and ODBC access.
\section rfc8_var Variable Naming
Much of the existing GDAL and OGR code uses an adapted Hungarian naming
convention. Use of this convention is not manditory, but when maintaining
code using this convention it is desirable to continue adhering to it with
changes. Most importantly, please avoiding using it improperly as that can
be very confusing.
In Hungarian prefixing the prefix tells something about about the type, and
potentially semantics of a variable. The following are some prefixes used
in GDAL/OGR.