It looks like it hasn't hit a release yet, but doc/sphinx-guides/source/developers/coding-style.rst may have some more information. I've done a little with astyle (although I didn't come up with a satisfactory solution to the "just reformat the code you changed, not the whole file" recommendation).

But regarding the question - the code styling seems inconsistent because it is inconsistent.

Thanks, @pameyer , yes I was going to point out that your pull request #4995 helped explain about our preferred curly brace placement. It's been merged already and can be seen here for now: http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4990-ec2-ansible-scripting/developers/coding-style.html#braces-placement

@poikilotherm thanks for pull request #5094! I'll move it to code review at "Community Dev" at https://waffle.io/IQSS/dataverse but like you said in the pull request we probably won't want to merge it exactly as is so there's a good chance we'll send it back to you with questions or create our own config based on what you've demonstrated in the pull request.

IMHO you should cover as many aspects as possible... The sooner you get a consistent styling and the sooner you get people to document the code they are writting the better. But that's just my 2 cents. 😉

@poikilotherm I think what we need is more of a baby step at this point so I just closed your pull request #5094 in favor of pull request #5106 which is smaller in scope and doesn't fail the build. Code review from all is welcome!