Coding guidelines When hacking on modest, please honour these time-tested coding guidelines. First, please follow the Linux CodingStyle guidelines (/usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle). Here are only some additional notes. Your editor may help you with this, for example for emacs: (c-set-style "K&R") (setq tab-width 8) (setq indent-tabs-mode t) (setq c-basic-offset 8) Or the equivalent in your favourite editor. Lines must not exceed 100 characters. Functions should do one thing, and do it well. In general, functions should not be much longer than 20-30 lines (except for, say, handling many different cases in a 'switch'-statement). Files should not get to big either; if there are more than, say, 800 lines, it's a sign that some refactoring should take place. Code should compile cleanly with gcc's -Wall compile option. Of course this might not always be possible due to problems in dependent libraries and/or compiler version. Therefore, do not include -Werror in the standard compile options; but do use it when building / testing things yourself. Code should also run cleanly. GTK+/GLib warnings and errors must be taken very seriously. If you run modest with the -d-flag, it will abort whenever there is such a warning. This can be useful when running inside the debugger. Global functions (the ones in .h-files) must be commented using gtk-doc. This way, we generate nice documentation. After installing (under /usr/local), we can browse the results with DevHelp. Just add /usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html to the DEVHELP_SEARCH_PATH-environment variable. Furthermore, please follow 'conventional wisdom' for programming with GLib/GTK+/GObject. Some things to remember: g_new, g_malloc and friends never return NULL. They terminate the application if it happens (normally). No need to check for NULL returns; g_return_if_fail and friends may be 'turned off', ie. they are to be used for error checking, but not for your programming logic