The Varnish Developers Guide¶

This is the deliberately short and to the point list of things Varnish Developers should know.

Behaviour¶

Our coding style guideline is FreeBSD’s style(9)
See autogen.des script for developer options to the toolchain.
We always -Werror, there are no harmless warnings, only source code that does not express intent well enough.
We prefer the source code, rather than the comments explain what is going on, that way tools like FlexeLint and Coverity also gets a chance.
Our reference platforms are Ubuntu and FreeBSD.
Asserts have negative cost, they save developer time next time around.
Our license is BSD 2-clause or looser, no GPL or LGPL.
It took 11 years for the first major security issue, and that was too soon.

Bugs, issues and feature requests start out as github issues.

Monday at 15:00-16:00 (EU time) we “bug-wash” on IRC (#varnish-hacking on irc.linpro.no) to decide who and how issues are dealt with.

Issues we cannot do anything about are closed.

If feature-requests make sense, they get moved to a wiki/VIP page until somebody implements them.

Varnishtest cases for bugs is the norm, not the exception.

These rules are imported from the X11 project:

It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is.
Do not serve all the world’s needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.
The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.
If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.
If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution.
Isolate complexity as much as possible.
Provide mechanism, rather than policy.