Hi Ingo, Thank you for your reply - I've answered inline, below.
> On Jul 5, 2017, at 10:14 AM, Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > > The OpenBSD way is to write userland network daemons in C, not in C++. Ok, thank you for clarifying that for me. I will proceed with development in C. As an aside - do OpenBSD developers track with the latest standard (C11), or is another standard preferred ? >> I was thinking the best way to get started would be to spend two >> to three months reading > > No. Certainly not. By all means, do read code, that is very > important, but do it in parallel to getting hands-on experience by > fixing bugs (and maybe implementing very simple features, which is > *much* harder, in particular because new features are often rejected > - it is not easy for beginners to figure out which new feature will > be considered useful and which won't). Also, don't stop reading > code after a few months; never stop doing that, at least not before > you die. Ok, that's a good point. I will read and practice by coding at the same time. In regards to either fixing small bugs and/or implementing new features, I must confess that while I am a software developer and also make use of OpenBSD in a sysadmin context, I have never prepared a patch and submitted it to OpenBSD. I understand that is probably considered rather basic in the context of committing to OpenBSD, but I truthfully have no experience with it (except that I do read patches as they are submitted on the ports mailing list as well as for the kernel proper). Is there a blog or sample mailing list thread I can reference to learn how to do this the proper way ? I don't expect to being sending patches immediately, but I would enjoy doing so as my reading and practicing progress. > Such a manpage definitely doesn't exist, or i would have heard about it. > > If best practice recommendations exist with respect to a specific > function, they are often explained in the manual page of that > function. For example, i added a notice to prefer getline(3) to > the top of the fgetln(3) manual just a few days ago. > > Such recommendations are sometimes placed at the top of the > DESCRIPTION, sometimes in EXAMPLES or CAVEATS, and may also > appear in other places. Sometimes, they are missing completely. > For example, to my surprise, strcpy(3) only mentions strlcpy(3) > below SEE ALSO. Ok. I had something like style(9) (https://man.openbsd.org/style.9) in mind, but of course: 1) It is the kernel style guide, not user land 2) It doesn't offer a lot of "prefer this" text (not that it should, of course, since it's more about style). That said it was worth reading and there are some things that I think apply regardless of where the code is. I also realized I forgot about the papers and presentations section of the website (https://www.openbsd.org/events.html), which has numerous coverage of pledge(2) and libtls, for instance. >> Separate from the possible man page, are there any relatively >> up-to-date examples that developers have been using to learn best >> practices for writing software for OpenBSD? > > No. Developers are learning by doing, and by advice from fellow > developers which they receive when posting their patches for review. Ok, good to know. Thanks again for your input, - J
