Welcome to pyElli
contributor's guide.
This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized
with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions
are also
appreciated.
If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org.
Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open,
considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation's Code of Conduct
is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.
If you experience bugs or general issues with pyElli
, please have a look
on the issue tracker. If you don't see anything useful there, please feel
free to fire an issue report.
Please don't forget to include the closed issues in your search.
Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered
solved.
New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.
You can help improve pyElli
docs by making them more readable and coherent, or
by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.
pyElli
documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler.
This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and
that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.
PyElli consists of different classes representing different parts of an ellipsometric experiment. You can see an overview graph in the documentation. If you want to add a dispersion, solver or material class to extend the present functionality you can do so by creating a new class under the respective abstract base classes.
Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it's best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.
Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment
to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages.
This can easily be done via either virtualenv
virtualenv <PATH TO VENV>
source <PATH TO VENV>/bin/activate
or Miniconda
conda create -n pyElli python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate pyElli
-
Create an user account on github if you do not already have one.
-
Fork the project repository click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on github.
-
Clone this copy to your local disk
git clone https://github.com:YourLogin/pyElli.git cd pyElli
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You should run
pip install -U pip setuptools -e .[fitting,dev]
which installs the package in development mode and all extra requirements in your current virtualenv.
-
Create a branch to hold your changes
git checkout -b my-feature
and start making changes. Never work on the master branch!
-
Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.
-
Add yourself to the list of contributors in
AUTHORS.md
. -
When you’re done editing, do
git add <MODIFIED FILES> git commit
to record your changes in git.
Important: Don't forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.
Moreover, writing a
descriptive commit message
is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all
to look for recurring communication patterns.
-
Please check that your changes don't break any unit tests with:
pytest
-
If you added features, please add them to the documentation and check the documentation status locally by running
python setup.py build_sphinx
This should create html pages in
build/sphinx/html
for you. -
We are using the python black formatter throughout the code and sphinx-lint for the docstrings. We supply a pre-commit hook which you can install accordingly to pre-commits documentation, which checks black formatting before the code is committed. For sphinx you have to invoke it manually by installing with
pip install sphinx-lint
and running
sphinx-lint
in the project directory.
-
If everything works fine, push your local branch to github with:
git push -u origin my-feature
-
Go to the web page of your fork and create a pull request to send your changes for review.