Developer Tips
Showing Whitespace
Dreamwidth does not want tabs or trailing whitespace, as per the Dev Programming Guidelines. These two tips can help you check out your patch before submission for these flaws.
In vim, you can show whitespace with the command
:set list
You can also use cat -et.
Error Messages
In .bml files, if you get an error message with a line number, the line numbering starts from the beginning of the code block, not from the beginning of the file.
The Daily Snapshot
Even if you don't use a Dreamhack for your development, the Dreamhack service can still help, because one of the Dreamhacks on the service is special - it's a live, always-running daily snapshot of the Dreamwidth code which is automatically reinstalled each day at 12:30am GMT. If you ever need to test something on a clean installation of the code, and don't require SSH access, you can use the Daily Snapshot at:
http://www.daily.hack.dreamwidth.net/
Feel free to make whatever changes you like; the 'hack is automatically reinstalled each day, so none of your changes will last long. (Similarly, if you find that someone else has messed with the installation enough for it to be unuseable for your purpose, you can simply wait a day and it'll be back to normal.)
Some notes about the service:
- Invite codes are turned off. You can create a new account by clicking "Create Account" in the Create menu.
- The password for the 'system' account is 'system'. Please don't change this unless you're testing something specifically related to that.
Otherwise, go wild. :)
