Welcome to the tedana repository! We're excited you're here and want to contribute.
These guidelines are designed to make it as easy as possible to get involved. If you have any questions that aren't discussed below, please let us know by opening an issue!
Before you start you'll need to set up a free GitHub account and sign in. Here are some instructions.
Already know what you're looking for in this guide? Jump to the following sections:
- Joining the conversation
- Contributing through Github
- Understanding issues, milestones, and project boards
- Making a change
- Structuring contributions
- Recognizing contributors
tedana is a young project maintained by a growing group of enthusiastic developers— and we're excited to have you join!
Most of our discussions will take place on open issues.
We also maintain a gitter chat room for more informal conversations and general project updates.
There is significant cross-talk between these two spaces, and we look forward to hearing from you in either venue!
As a reminder, we expect all contributions to tedana to adhere to our code of conduct.
We run monthly developer calls via Zoom.
You can see the schedule via the tedana google calendar.
An agenda will be circulated in the gitter channel in advance of the meeting.
Everyone is welcome. We look forward to meeting you there 🌺
git is a really useful tool for version control. GitHub sits on top of git and supports collaborative and distributed working.
You'll use Markdown to chat in issues and pull requests on GitHub.
You can think of Markdown as a few little symbols around your text that will allow GitHub
to render the text with a little bit of formatting.
For example you could write words as bold (**bold**), or in italics (*italics*),
or as a link ([link](https://https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)) to another webpage.
GitHub has a helpful page on getting started with writing and formatting Markdown on GitHub.
Every project on GitHub uses issues, milestones, and project boards slightly differently.
The following outlines how the tedana developers think about these different tools.
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Issues are individual pieces of work that need to be completed to move the project forwards. A general guideline: if you find yourself tempted to write a great big issue that is difficult to describe as one unit of work, please consider splitting it into two or more issues.
Issues are assigned labels which explain how they relate to the overall project's goals and immediate next steps.
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Milestones are the link between the issues and the high level strategy for the
tedanaproject. Contributors new and old are encouraged to take a look at the milestones to see how we are progressing towardstedana's shared vision.Issues are assigned to these milestones by the maintainers. If you feel that an issue should be assigned to a specific milestone but the maintainers have not done so, just ask! We might have just missed it, or we might not (yet) see how it aligns with the overall project structure. These conversations are important to have, and we are excited to hear your perspective!
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The project board is an automated Kanban board to keep track of what is currently underway (in progress), what has been completed (done), and what remains to be done for a specific release. The
tedanamaintainers use this board to keep an eye on how tasks are progressing week by week.
The current list of labels are here and include:
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These issues contain a task that a member of the team has determined we need additional help with.
If you feel that you can contribute to one of these issues, we especially encourage you to do so!
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These issues point to problems in the project.
If you find new a bug, please give as much detail as possible in your issue, including steps to recreate the error. If you experience the same bug as one already listed, please add any additional information that you have as a comment.
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These issues are asking for enhancements to be added to the project.
Please try to make sure that your enhancement is distinct from any others that have already been requested or implemented. If you find one that's similar but there are subtle differences please reference the other request in your issue.
We appreciate all contributions to tedana, but those accepted fastest will follow a workflow similar to the following:
1. Comment on an existing issue or open a new issue referencing your addition.
This allows other members of the tedana development team to confirm that you aren't overlapping with work that's currently underway and that everyone is on the same page with the goal of the work you're going to carry out.
This blog is a nice explanation of why putting this work in up front is so useful to everyone involved.
2. Fork the tedana repository to your profile.
This is now your own unique copy of tedana. Changes here won't effect anyone else's work, so it's a safe space to explore edits to the code!
Make sure to keep your fork up to date with the master repository.
3. Make the changes you've discussed.
Try to keep the changes focused. We've found that working on a new branch makes it easier to keep your changes targeted.
When you're creating your pull request, please make sure to review the tedana style conventions.
Note that to test a change, you may need to set up your local repository to run a tedana workflow. To do so, run
python setup.py develop
which should ensure all packages are correctly organized and linked on your user profile. Once you've run this, your repository should be set for most changes (i.e., you do not have to re-run with every change).
4. Submit a pull request.
A member of the development team will review your changes to confirm that they can be merged into the main code base. When opening the pull request, we ask that you follow some specific conventions. We outline these below.
To improve understanding pull requests "at a glance", we encourage the use of several standardized tags. When opening a pull request, please use at least one of the following prefixes:
- [BRK] for changes which break existing builds or tests
- [DOC] for new or updated documentation
- [ENH] for enhancements
- [FIX] for bug fixes
- [REF] for refactoring existing code
- [STY] for stylistic changes
- [TST] for new or updated tests, and
- [WIP] for changes which are not yet ready to be merged
Pull requests should be submitted early and often! If your pull request is not yet ready to be merged, please also include the [WIP] prefix. This tells the development team that your pull request is a "work-in-progress", and that you plan to continue working on it.
You can also combine the tags above, for example if you are updating both a test and the documentation: [TST, DOC]. If you're still working on the pull request that prefix would be [WIP, TST, DOC].
Docstrings should follow numpydoc convention. We encourage extensive documentation.
The python code itself should follow PEP8 convention whenever possible, with at most about 500 lines of code (not including docstrings) per script.
Our documentation is written in ReStructuredText, which we explain in more detail below.
The documentation for tedana is written using ReStructuredText.
Using this markup language allows us to create an online site using the Sphinx
documentation generator.
We then host the generated Sphinx site on ReadTheDocs,
to provide an easily accessible space for accessing tedana documentation.
What this means is that we need to add any updates to the documentation in ReStructuredText,
or rst.
The resulting text looks slightly different from the markdown formatting you'll
use on github, but we're excited to help you get started!
Here's one guide we've found particularly helpful for starting with rst.
And, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!
We welcome and recognize all contributions from documentation to testing to code development. You can see a list of current contributors in the contributors tab.
You're awesome. 👋😃
— Based on contributing guidelines from the STEMMRoleModels project.