Federico Mena-Quintero federico@gnome.org 2013 Other style guides and books about organizing free software projects Additional Materials

Here we give you links to other materials that you may want to read. These will teach you a lot about how to work on large distributed teams of free software developers, and about good programming style in general.

Producing Open Source Software, by Karl Fogel. This is a truly excellent book of good practices that free software projects should follow. This is about social aspects of the project: how to treat contributors, how to organize and moderate communication, how to deal with non-profit foundations. If you ask yourself at any time, "how should I deal with $human_situation in the project?", this book may provide the answer.

GNU Coding Standards. This is an old document, but it still has lots of excellent advice. It talks about C coding style, issues when dealing with plug-in systems, common option names for command-line programs, conventions for Makefiles, and some very GNU-ish details like using Texinfo for documentation.

Linux Kernel Coding Style. Explains the rationale for "big indentation", brace placement, concise but unambiguous naming, and centralized exit of functions.