Except where unavoidable, separate commits should be made for: Machine-dependent commits Machine-independent commits bug-fix commits feature-add commits code-cleanup commits ANSIfication commits While it may seem onerous to do the extra work to keep these things separate, extra work for the committer means less work for everyone else who goes to look at the changes later. There are obvious grey areas - are two features appropriate for one commit, or two - continue to use your judgement. All these actions help in the later use of cvs diff, annotate, etc. A file entitled the NetBSD source code style guide is located in the tree at src/share/misc/style. If you haven't already, you want to read this as soon as possible.