Thank you for your interest in contributing!
The developers of this project can be found in freenode IRC #freeciv-dev and in this discord guild, channel #dev. If you want an idea for a good starting project, poke someone in there first.
- Try not to exceed 200 LOC +- in a single PR.
- Avoid whitespace-only or other trivial changes that do not change logic.
The best thing you can do is to keep commits and PRs contextual. Small PRs are great, as they're easy to review and approve. Large, multi-faceted PRs are more difficult to review, and may get rejected for one portion,though other portions would have been accepted if they were independent.
A PR should generally have a purpose other than "fixing code"; changing lines just for the sake of style or syntax obscures the commit history of a file. In other words, the why of a line of code's existence can usually be determined by the comments in the previous commit for that line and those around it - git blame is used to see why a change was made, understand the context, and determine if, and how it can/should be modified. To change code simply for the sake of whitespace, or re-arranging lines is frowned upon, because it unnecessarily hides/buries history.