Coding Standards

This is a common baseline for coding standards suitable for all LC projects and is intended to avoid opinionated issus where various projects will reasonably disagree. Only standards which can be enforced or applied by tools are included — policies which require human judgement are out of scope for this project.

The top-level .editorconfig file is Editor Config intended to set basic editor defaults which are intended to be suitable for all projects in all languages:

• UTF-8 encoding
• Unix line-termination
• Spaces for indentation with a tab size of 4
• Trailing whitespace is automatically trimmed (this will avoid Git highlighting extra whitespace)

Just copy it into your project's root directory and if your editor doesn't have native support install the plugin: http://editorconfig.org/#download

Language-Specific Configuration

Each language has a subdirectory which contains a README file with instructions for the tools and conventions popular in that language. For example, Python tooling will be built around PEP-8 but Java will reasonably differ.

General Policies

Licensing and Third-Party Code

The Library has a long history of using and releasing open-source software and usage continues to expand. If you intend to release your project as open source please see the official release process:

https://staff.loc.gov/sites/webproduction/library-of-congress-web-policies/distribution-of-open-source-software/

All projects — whether internal and open-source — should make it easy to tell which license(s) apply to their code. The best way to do this is to avoid committing code which is not owned by the Library and instead using a package manager to download it as part of the build process. This keeps our repositories small, affirms that we are not modifying the code in question, and avoids having to document which third-part code is being redistributed and that we are legally allowed to do so.

If there is a good reason why this cannot be done, such as an upstream project which does not cleanly package its code, third-party code should be stored in a vendor or external directory in a directory which contains both the code and a README or LICENSE file providing context and making it clear that the Library is not claiming ownership of the code in question.