Hi Frank,
technically, the best is to create a branch on Launchpad.
As for code formatting, just look around, and see the files, and how they are formatted. It is not uniform everywhere, but relatively close. The part I wrote is GNU style formatted, with the emacs defaults.
If you have questions about some specifics, e.g. RNGs, template types, error handling, etc. and you can't find the answer in the manual, then please let us know, either on this list (if you think the question might be interesting for others as well), or on launchpad.
Thanks!
G.