Contributing

Bug reports, feature suggestions and other contributions are greatly appreciated! While I can’t promise to implement everything, I will always try to respond in a timely manner.

Short version

  • Submit bug reports and feature requests at GitHub
  • Make pull requests to the develop branch

Bug reports

When reporting a bug please include:

  • Your operating system name and version
  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting
  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug

Feature requests and feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at GitHub.

If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.
  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
  • Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that code contributions are welcome :)

Development

To set up aacgm2 for local development:

  1. Fork aacgm2 on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally:

    git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/aacgmv2.git

  3. Create a branch for local development:

    git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

    Now you can make your changes locally. Add tests for bugs and new features in tests/test_py_aacgmv2.py (for the wrapper), test_c_aacgmv2.py (for the C extension), or tests/test_cmd_aacgmv2.py (for the command-line interface). The tests are run with py.test and can be written as normal functions (starting with test_) containing a standard assert statement for testing output.

  4. When you’re done making changes, run all the checks, doc builder and spell checker with tox [1]:

    tox

  5. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

    git add .
git commit -m "Brief description of your changes"
git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

  6. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website. Pull requests should be made to the develop branch.

Pull Request Guidelines

One simple guideline: Don’t break userspace. That is, changing the public interface in a backwards-incompatible way is strongly discouraged. Although this package is not as essential as an operating system kernel, remember that there may be people out there that use this package. Changing the interface in an incompatible way will break their setup and cause headaches. So be kind to others and avoid such cases as much as possible, it is exactly the reason why this fork exists at all. You can read more about why keeping an API stable is a good thing, and the kernel documentation.

If you need some code review or feedback while you’re developing the code, just make a pull request.

For merging, you should:

  1. Include passing tests (run tox) [1]
  2. Update/add documentation if relevant
  3. Add a note to CHANGELOG.rst about the changes
  4. Add yourself to AUTHORS.rst
[1](1, 2) If you don’t have all the necessary Python versions available locally or have trouble building NumPy in all the testing environments, you can rely on Travis and AppVeyor - they will run the tests for each change you add in the pull request.

Tips

To run a subset of tests:

tox -e envname -- py.test -k test_myfeature

To run all the test environments in parallel (you need to pip install detox):

detox