This short (hopefully) memo is about to define the coding style
recommended for OpenSM development.

The goal of this is to make OpenSM code base to be standard in terms of
the rest of OpenIB management software, OpenIB projects and Linux in
general. And in this way to make OpenSM more developer friendly and to
involve more open source programmers to be part of OpenSM development
process.

The goal of this is not to provide long and boring list of coding style
paradigms, but rather to define general coding style concept and to
suggest a way for such a concept to be implemented in the existing
OpenSM code base.

The OpenSM project is an OpenIB and Linux centric project, so we think
it is reasonable to use the coding style most popular with OpenIB
projects (linux/Documentation/CodingStyle) as the starting point rather
than reinventing one more coding style rule-set.

Some things from there in short: tab character for indentation and space
character for alignment, K&R style braces, short local and meanful
global names, please no confused Hungary style, short functions. And of
course to be reasonable about all above.


Some ideas about existing OpenSM code improvements in terms of the
Coding style:

* When writing new code, please try to follow the new Coding style.
* Coding style improvement patches are desired and accepted, but please
  try to not mix coding style improvement with functional and other
  changes in one patch.
* When you are going to improve coding style for existing code, please
  try to do it for entire file(s).