Most developers find Linux coding style easy to read, and there is really no reason to reinvent this practise, so procps-ng goes along with others. http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/CodingStyle In addition to Linux coding style this project has few additional wishes to contributors. * Many small patches are favoured over one big. Break down is done on basis of logical functionality; for example #endif mark ups, compiler warning and exit codes fixes all should be individual small patches. * Use 'FIXME: ' in code comments, manual pages, autotools files, scripts and so on to indicate something is wrong. The reason we do is as simple as being able to find easily where problem areas are. * In writing arithmetic comparisons, use "<" and "<=" rather than ">" and ">=". For some justification, read this: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/3903/focus=4126 * Be nice to translators. Don't change translatable strings if you can avoid it. If you must rearrange individual lines (e.g., in multi-line --help strings), extract and create new strings, rather than extracting and moving into existing blocks. This avoids making unnecessary work for translators.