(anal) Q: Are there any coding styles or development guidelines?

I'm currently doing a source audit of the git core components. Mainly I want to check if I can spot some left over memory leaks.

Unfortunately ;) I didn't find any so far (after reading five files).

Still I did find quite a lot of stuff that lint would most likely complain about. Like not checking return values. Should this be fixed now or isn't it time to do the cleanup, yet?

I also found several literal copies of the same function including function name, parameter list, etc. Wouldn't it be better do clean those up and put them in a utility.{c,h} file? A similar problem is the continous reimplementation of linked lists, dynamic memory, smart strings / vectors, etc. And then there are some stale files (i.e. revision.*) that the Changelog already mentions as removed, but which are still active in HEAD.

I am a little reluctant to do the work, as the code still changes so fast I do not really know if code I fix will still be there tomorrow.

Also I do not know if there is any notion of coding style published somewhere. I only noticed, that the code does not look like anything I'd have written and seems to follow some general principle.

Kind regards,

--Robert Suetterlin (robert@mpe.mpg.de) phone: (+49)89 / 30000-3546 fax: (+49)89 / 30000-3950