Kicksecure Coding Style

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Revision as of 02:41, 20 February 2022 by Nurmagoz (talk | contribs)
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Documentation for this is incomplete. Contributions are happily considered! See this for potential alternatives.

Simplicity

For lack of better term, Kicksecure is simple. It does not fork or re-compile software packages by upstream projects.

Examples of software where it is often assumed that it is being modified by Kicksecure or being asked in that is the case:

This has the advantage that questions and issues caused by upstream projects can be redirected upstream as per Free Support Principle. This reduces the maintenance load at Kicksecure project.

Issues which cannot be caused by Kicksecure are sometimes mistakenly attributed to Kicksecure. Examples:

Related: Relationship With Upstream

Brevity

It’s good to be innovative. Such as in case of Kicksecure shipping kloakarchive.org iconarchive.today icon by default is a win. That threat model has been demonstrated through a proof of concept already. Proactive yes, but in this case of remounting /etc with nosuid the benefit of the change doesn’t have a strong rationale.

In most cases goals should be reached by using 1 implementation. For example to remount /run etc. with more secure mount options an implementation should do this - if possible - either entirely in initramfs or entirely using systemd. It shouldn't do the exact same things twice in initramfs and systemd.

There’s a huge amount of things which users might potentially do which won’t make sense from Kicksecure developers point of view. For example there is the helloarchive.org iconarchive.today icon package which most users won’t know and won’t install. I am using it as an example here. No need to pick on that particular contributor of that Debian package. Why allow installation of that package? What if that contributor turned evil and somehow included a backdoor in the hello package? To prevent such a backdoor from doing damage, there could be an apt wrapper that prevents installation of that and other packages which most users will probably never need. I am not supposing to invent an apt wrapper for this hypothetical scenario. It would be worse having that code than having that risk.

Feature Removability

In case a feature becomes unmaintainable there needs to be a possiblity to remove the feature for users who use upgrade their system using apt.

Default Application Policy

See Default Application Policy.

No Trailing Whitespaces

Get a decent editor and don’t leave whitespace at the end of lines.

Indentation

Do not use too deep levels of if and similar.

Bad example: 

machine_id() {
   if ! test -f /etc/machine-id ; then
      existing_machine_id="$(cat /etc/machine-id)"
      ## ...
   fi
}

In above example there is need need to put everything under the if. This is specifically important when there are several levels of conditionals.

Example good: 

machine_id() {
   if ! test -f /etc/machine-id ; then
      return 0
   fi

   existing_machine_id="$(cat /etc/machine-id)"
   ## ....
}

Shell Scripts

avoid sed awk whenever possible

There might be some older code (before introduction of str_replace) that uses sed / awk. Patches welcome to port to str_replace.

use str_replace whenever possible

str_replacearchive.org iconarchive.today icon is installed in Kicksecure / Kicksecure by default. (man pagearchive.org iconarchive.today icon) [1]

use type -P instead of which

Please do not use which. Please use type -P instead.

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/081archive.org iconarchive.today icon

Proper Whitespace Handling

See Dev/bash.

See Also

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  1. ↑ https://github.com/Samer-Al-iraqi/Linux-str_replace/archive.org iconarchive.today icon
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