tildefriends/docs/guidelines/documentation-guidelines.md

# Documentation guidelines

This document defines the rules used to write documentation in order to make it more consistent.
This documentation is a living document and so are it's rules; you are free to propose changes but in the meantime, please stick to them.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119/).

## File naming

Files SHOULD be named using [kebab-case](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/snake-case-vs-camel-case-vs-pascal-case-vs-kebab-case-whats-the-difference/#kebab-case).
Their names should be meaningful and SHOULD not conflict with other files in other directories:

> Example: this document is named `docs/guidelines/documentation-guidelines.md` instead of `docs/guidelines/documentation.md` because it could cause confusion with `docs/documentation.md`.

## Documentation

When writing documentation, the author should have in mind it's target audience: people with varying technical skills and backgrounds, fluency in peer-to-peer-specific terms and mental ability.
The documentation should therefore be acessible and usefule to most people interested in building, using and contributing to Tilde Friends.

### Terminology

`Tilde Friends` refers to the projectas a whole. This can be abbreviated to `TF`.

`tildefriends` refers to the program.

### Style guide

1. Lines SHOULD NOT be wrapped, to allow clients to dynamically wrap them however they want:

    ```text
    This is not very pleasant to read because
    the text
    is manually wrapped, but the size of the
    screen is
    smaller than the size the text is wrapped
    at. I
    need to write even more useless text here
    so I get
    my point across. Also hi! If you're here
    that
    means you're either going to contribute to
    Tilde
    Friends, or that you're reviewing my
    stupid
    changes. Either way, you're awesome!
    ```

    You MAY use one line per sentence.

2. Lines ending with an `inline code block` or hyperlinks SHOULD NOT end with a period to make copy-pasting easier.

    > Example: To build in docker, `$ docker build .`

    NB: this does not apply to file names or other text that are not meant to be copy-pasted.

    > Example: this document is named `docs/guidelines/documentation-guidelines.md` instead of `docs/guidelines/documentation.md` because it could cause confusion with `docs/documentation.md`.

3. Commands SHOULD start with a caret: (is that the tehnical term ?)

    - `$` if the command should be run as the current user 
    - `#` if the command should be run as root

    > Example: To build in docker, `$ docker build .`

More TODO

## License

As per the rest of the code in this repository, the documentation is shared under the [MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT/) license.

## Changelog

### v1 (2024-05-12)

First version; 3 new guidelines.