# The Varnish Developers Guide

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

## Behaviour

- Be sensible.
- If in doubt, think.
- If still in doubt, ask.
- Admit your mistakes, it’s faster that way.
- Thou SHALL not paint bikesheds.
- We will toss you out of the project rather than add another rule.

## Technical stuff

- 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, feature requests & VIPs

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

Monday at 13:00-14:00 (EU time) we “bug-wash” on IRC 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.

## Architectural stuff

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.