CONTRIBUTING.rst

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

Types of Contributions

Reporting of Bugs and Defects

A defect is any variance between actual and expected result, this can include bugs in the code or defects in the documentation or visualization.

Please report defects to the the GitLab Tracker using the Defect description template.

Merge Request Guidelines for details on best developmental practices.

Features

If you wish to propose a feature, please file an issue on the GitLab Tracker using the Feature description template. Community members will help refine and design your idea until it is ready for implementation. Via these early reviews, we hope to steer contributors away from producing work outside of the project boundaries.

Please see the Merge Request Guidelines for details on best developmental practices.

Documentation

The project could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official lbfgsb docs, in docstrings, tutorials and even on the web in blog posts, articles and such.

For docstrings, please use the numpy docstring format.

Working on issues

After an issue is created, the progress of the issues is tracked on the GitHub issue board. The maintainers will update the state using labels . Once an issue is ready for review a Merge Request can be opened.

Merge Request Guidelines

Please make merge requests into the develop branch (not the master branch). Each request should be self-contained and address a single issue on the tracker.

Before you submit a merge request, check that it meets these guidelines:

1. New code should be fully tested; running pytest in coverage mode can help identify gaps.
2. Documentation is updated, this includes docstrings and any necessary changes to existing tutorials, user documentation and so forth. We use the numpy docstring format.
3. The CI pipelines should pass for all merge requests.
   • Check the status of the pipelines, the status is also reported in the merge request.
   • flake8 linter should pass.
   • No degradation in code coverage.
   • Documentation should build.
4. Ensure your merge request contains a clear description of the changes made and how it addresses the issue. If useful, add a screenshot to showcase your work to facilitate an easier review.

Congratulations! The maintainers will now review your work and suggest any necessary changes. If no changes are required, a maintainer will "approve" the review. If you are Thank you very much for your hard work in improving the project.

Setting up lbfgsb for local development

Ready to contribute? Here's how to set up lbfgsb for local development.

1. Fork the lbfgsb repo on GitLab.

2. Clone your fork locally:

   $ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/lbfgsb.git

3. Install your local copy into a virtualenv. Assuming you have virtualenvwrapper installed, this is how you set up your fork for local development:

   $ mkvirtualenv lbfgsb
   $ cd lbfgsb/
   $ pip install -e .
   $ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt

4. Create a branch for local development:

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

   Now you can make your changes locally.

5. When you're done making changes, check that your changes pass flake8, the tests and have test coverage:

   $ flake8 lbfgsb tests
   $ pytest --cov

If you have worked on documentation instead of code you may want to preview how your docs look locally. You can build the docs locally using:

$ cd docs
$ make html

The docs will be located in lbfgsb/docs/_build.

6. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitLab:

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

7. Submit a merge request through the GitLab website.

Tip

Autobuild documentation

If you are working on documentation it can be useful to automatically rebuild the docs after every change. This can be done using the sphinx-autobuild package. Through the following command:

$ sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html

The documentation will then be hosted on localhost:8000

Tip

Running parts of the test suite

To run only parts of the test suite, specify the folder in which to look for tests as an argument to pytest. The following example

$ py.test tests/measurement --cov lbfgsb/measurement

will look for tests located in the tests/measurement directory and report test coverage of the lbfgsb/measurement module.