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

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