Collaborative management

KISS and comply to standards

Keep it simple: follow the best standards, carefully draft and write high quality documentation, provide a stable and robust system and keep the rootfs on the LiveCD light enough to run on machines with at least 128 MB RAM. It's also possible to use GTK+2, Dialog, SHell scripts, or PHP coding tools on the distribution. The idea is not to duplicate and to think small...

Tank - Build host & home

Each contributor may have an account on the project server with secure access, disk space, a public directory and all development tools. Developers can compile packages and maintainers of the mirror can handle synchronization. Tank also hosts the Build Bot, Web boot and SliTaz Pro: tank.slitaz.org

Instructions on using the build host are described in the Cookbook: SliTaz Build Host (tank).

Mercurial repositories

SliTaz Mercurial or Hg repos can be browsed or cloned by anyone using the URL: https://hg.slitaz.org/. People with write access can directly use repos.slitaz.org which requires authentication. Mercurial uses Python and is installable with: tazpkg get-install mercurial

~/.hgrc

Before you push your first commit onto the server, be sure that you have a correct Hg configuration file with your name and email address, and remember to check that you are not root. Personal ~/.hgrc file example: 

[ui]
username = FirstName LastName <you@example.com>

Clone, modify, commit and push

Clone a repo, example for wok:

 $ hg clone http://repos.slitaz.org/wok

Change directory to wok, note you must be in the repository to be able to use 'hg' commands. To check all logs or just the last log: 

 $ hg log
 $ hg head

Add or modify one or more files and commit:

 $ hg add
 $ hg status
 $ hg commit -m "Log message..."
 $ hg log

Note that you can use the command rollback to roll back to the last transaction. Before pushing changes to the server, it is safe to pull once: 

 $ hg pull
 $ hg push

Done, your changes, code or corrections are now on the server.

Updating a local wok

To update your wok with the local server (pull to pull the changes):

 $ hg pull -u

Useful commands

GUI - Pure C/GTK, Yad, Vala/Genie and CGI/web

There are many ways to create user interfaces in the open source world. From the start of the project until 3.0 we mainly used a tool called Gtkdialog which let us create quite nice and complex interfaces in GTK, but using a scripting language that just ran without having to be compiled. But gtkdialog is unmaintained and lacks many new GTK features, so we switched to Yad for simple GUI boxes. For all the administration, packages and configuration tools we switched to TazPanel, a CGI/web interface with a gui coded in HTML5 and CSS3.

Yad scripts should follow TazYad guidelines: README and example code

Implementation of iconv()

SliTaz uses iconv() provided by GNU glibc - any packages that offer libiconv must use the library contained in glibc-locale. There is therefore no longer a libiconv package (1.2 MB) in SliTaz.

Building SliTaz packages

Officially building is done with the Cookutils suite. This package is installed on each SliTaz system as well as documentation about using cook and creating SliTaz packages suitable for the TazPKG packages manager.

The tazpkg packages in SliTaz are automatically created via the Cooker from the Cookutils package and a receipt in the wok. The Cookbook describes the format of receipts. Cookutils and receipt documentation are required reading before we begin.

In terms of choice of package, the idea is to offer a package by task or functionality, ie. the lightest application in the field and not duplicated.

Naming of packages

In most cases the package name is the same as the source, except for Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Lua modules. For example, the package providing a Kid template system written in Python and XML is named: python-kid.

Website Management

The website is managed via a Mercurial repository, this can be cloned by: 

 $ hg clone https://hg.slitaz.org/website
  Or if you have the proper permissions:
 $ hg clone http://repos.slitaz.org/website

Coding style

Pages are coded in HTML5 with tabs for indentation. The title of level 1 is used only once (at the top), level 2 is the title of the document and levels 3 and 4 are then used for subtitles. Paragraphs are contained in <p></p> tags. To put code inside a paragraph use <code>. To display commands or terminal output use <pre>. Internal links are relative.

Diff and patch

The utilities diff and patch are command-line tools for creating and implementing a file containing differences between two files. To create a diff file readable by humans in a simple text editor, supply the -u option: 

 $ diff -u file.orig file.new > file.diff

To apply a patch:

 $ patch file.orig file.diff