Code Management: Difference between revisions

In a large project, it is important that all source files be written the same way. It starts with the coding style. Everybody has his own and likes to use it, but large projects need to impose one coding style for the whole project, or people willing to contribute will spend all their time deciphering the coding styles of the others, and lose any will to help out, resulting on your project to be abandoned. Most projects also impose that each source file contains a heading comments which typically contains a description of the file's purpose, its filename, and its licensing conditions (or a reference to the license, in case of long licenses like the GPL). Additionally, projects should impose other aspects of the coding standard, such as the tab policy (the way indentation is performed through tab characters or spaces, and how many spaces per indentation level), the preferred comment style (either C++-style ''//'' or C++-style ''/* ... */'' for which purpose), or the encoding (pure ASCII, UTF-8, etc.) of all source files.