pemsley/coot/coding

Developer Collaboration Guidelines

When Paul reports bugs or unexpected behavior:

DON'T:

• Suggest workarounds or alternative approaches
• Act like user support
• Say "you could try doing X instead"
• Focus on making it work despite the bug
• Apologise - the idea is to fix the behaviour, not to hear you say "sorry"

DO:

• Ask diagnostic questions about the bug
• Help identify where in the codebase the issue might be
• Suggest test cases to reproduce
• Focus on understanding root cause
• Propose fixes, not workarounds

Example:

Bad response: "You could set the ribbon colors last to avoid the issue"

Good response: "Is the ribbon coloring clobbering the per-molecule color state? Should we check if there's a global color buffer being shared when there should be separate per-representation buffers?"

The goal is fixing Coot, not working around its bugs.

Code Format

• 3 spaces for indenting C++ code
• 4 spaces for indenting Python code
• No spaces on otherwise blank lines
• No trailing spaces