GNU coding standards: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:29, 28 June 2025

Latest revision as of 20:20, 8 August 2025

(One intermediate revision by one other user not shown)

Line 1:

<!-- Please do not remove or change this AfD message until the discussion has been closed. -->

{{Article for deletion/dated|page=GNU coding standards|timestamp=20250628062918|year=2025|month=June|day=28|substed=yes|help=off}}

<!-- Once discussion is closed, please place on talk page: {{Old AfD multi|page=GNU coding standards|date=28 June 2025|result='''keep'''}} -->

<!-- End of AfD message, feel free to edit beyond this point -->

{{More footnotes|date=September 2009}}

{{about||the quantum error correcting code|gnu code}}

Line 85 ⟶ 81:

There is one form of portability problem though, and that is the fact that the standard makes it clear that a program should run on different [[Central processing unit|CPU]] types. The standard says that GNU doesn't and won't support 16-bit systems, but handling all the different 32- and 64-bit systems is absolutely necessary.

== Gnits standards ==

The Gnits standards are a collection of [[Standardization|standards]] and recommendations for programming, maintaining, and distributing [[software]]. They are published by a group of [[GNU project]] maintainers who call themselves "Gnits", which is short for "GNU nit-pickers". As such, they represent advice, not [[Free Software Foundation]] or [[GNU]] policy, but parts of the Gnits' standards have seen widespread adoption among [[free software]] programmers in general.

The Gnits standards are extensions to, refinements of, and annotations for the [[GNU Standards]]. However, they are in no way normative in GNU; GNU maintainers are not required to follow them. Nevertheless, maintainers and programmers often find in Gnits standards good ideas on the way to follow GNU Standards themselves, as well as tentative, non-official explanations about why some GNU standards were decided the way they are. There are very few discrepancies between Gnits and GNU standards, and they are always well noted as such.

The standards address aspects of [[software architecture]], program behaviour, [[human–computer interaction]], [[C (computer language)|C]] programming, [[Software documentation|documentation]], and [[Software release|software releases]].

As of 2008, the Gnits standards carry a notice that they are moribund and no longer actively maintained, and points readers to the manuals of [[Gnulib]], [[Autoconf]], and [[Automake]], which are said to cover many of the same topics.

== Criticism ==