There is a large body of good-practice traditions for
open-source code that helps other people port, use, and cooperate with
developing it. Some of these conventions are traditional in the Unix
world and predate Linux; others have developed recently in response to
particular new tools and technologies such as the World Wide
Web.
This document will help you learn good practice. It is organized
into topic sections, each containing a series of checklist items. Think of
these as a pre-flight checklist for your patch or software
distribution.