gosentry/docs/STANDARDS.md

GoSentry — Standards

Quality rules and intentional behavior for contributors. Package contracts live in ARCHITECTURE.md; test conventions in TESTS.md; what a whole-project review looks at, in REVIEW.md.

Code quality

• Follow package contracts in ARCHITECTURE.md.
• User-facing errors → dialog.ShowError or a History event, never a silent return.
• Pure helpers → unit test in the same package.
• Fixes with severity ≥ medium → regression test.
• Documented intentional behavior → section below, not a backlog bug.
• UI view constructors accept *app.Service; call app.Open() only from run.go.
• A size that must follow the theme is measured at build time, not written as a pixel constant. theme.Padding() and text metrics depend on the running app's theme, text size, and DPI, so a hand-tuned number is only correct for the one theme it was tuned against and clips under any other. Measure the real widget, or derive the value from the theme, in a named helper: rowOverlap (theme padding), captionColumnWidth and textColumnWidth (the widest of the actual strings), activityRowsHeight (the list's own row template). The same applies to a ratio computed from an absolute width — see initialSplitOffset. A raw pixel literal is left only where nothing about it tracks the theme, and says so in a comment.

Config file compatibility

There is no migration step: gosentry.json and jobs.json are read as-is, are meant to be hand-editable, and may have been written by an older version. A change to their shape has to stay compatible on its own.

• A new Config field is tagged omitempty, and its zero value must mean the behavior that existed before the field was added — a file written without it keeps working unchanged. DefaultConfig() still sets the value explicitly.
• A zero that carries meaning is not a missing field and must not be backfilled on load. See DefaultTimeoutSeconds in storage.loadOrCreateConfig and Job.TimeoutSeconds *int, where unset and 0 are different answers.
• An unrecognised enum value reads as the default rather than an error, through one helper that every consumer shares (JobListView.IsCompact, ui.themeFor), and is normalized before being written back, so the file never gains a value no reader understands.
• A renamed key keeps the old field on Config (tagged omitempty) purely so it can still be read. storage.loadOrCreateConfig converts it to the new field and clears it, so the retired key disappears on the next save. See Config.JobsDir → Config.JobsFile. Where the new field has a non-empty default, clear that default before unmarshalling, or "the file omits it" and "the file sets it" become indistinguishable and the conversion never runs.
• Each of the three gets a test: the default in storage, the normalization in domain, and a round-trip through the real config file in app.

Intentional behavior (not bugs)

• RunNow is allowed during global pause and for disabled jobs.
• Selecting a jobs file that already exists loads it: its jobs replace the in-memory list, which is the only way the user can switch between job lists. A path with no file behind it receives the current jobs (rename/relocate). The switch is refused while a job is running, because adoption drops every runtime and a finishing run would then write its result onto whichever job inherited its ID.
• Sequential mode runs jobs FIFO by order in jobs.json.
• Scheduler tick is 1s — sub-second @every intervals are not supported.
• Command timeout defaults to no timeout globally (Config.DefaultTimeoutSeconds = 0) and is overridable per job (Job.TimeoutSeconds *int: unset = inherit the global default, 0 = no timeout, positive = seconds). Neither zero may be normalized away on load — 0 is a value, not a missing field.
• History tab is session-only. JobRuntime.Logs exists only in memory for the current process. Log files on disk feed aggregate statistics via SeedStats only. See ARCHITECTURE.md.

Out of scope

Larger or blocked work is tracked in ROADMAP.md (window size persistence, History column filters, CI coverage gate).