Developer’s Guide

This document describes the preferred method for developing the core PySIT package.

Note

This document is lacking in some areas. If anything is confusing, please do not hesitate to contact the developers for clarification.

A very good resource on developing is the Astropy Developer Documentation, upon which future versions of this documentation will be based. Many of their specifications are not applicable for this project, but many more are. Studying their guide is a very good way to get started.

DVCS and Hosting

PySIT uses Git for version control and github.com for code and project hosting. You will need to install the appropriate version of Git for your platform.

PySIT’s is hosted by ReadTheDocs.

Forking PySIT

PySIT development will take place in your own fork of the main PySIT repository. A fork is a “clone” of the repository and is hosted on your personal Github account. You will use this fork for developing new PySIT features. Your changes will migrate to the core repository (for review and merging) by requesting that the main repository “pull” in your changes. This is known as a pull request and is facilitated through the GitHub website.

After creating your fork, you will need to create a local clone:

git clone https://github.com/<username>/pysit.git <target_dir>

Your development will occur in your local clone.

Development Workflow

A rough sketch of the workflow for adding new features to PySIT is described below. Please use this for adding new general features and methods from the literature. If you are developing new research and are not sure if it belongs in PySIT, please ask or use a PySIT Extension package.

Note

We will follow the branching strategy specified by A successful Git branching model (just replace the relevant git commands with their hg equivalent). This strategy is implemented with the hg-flow Mercurial extension and is integrated with SourceTree.

Note

We will refer to the main PySIT repository as the upstream repository. You can add this to your local repository:

git remote add upstream upstream https://github.com/pysit/pysit.git

and substitute your username.

Roughly, the procedure for adding a new feature or fixing a bug is:

  1. In your local clone of your fork of the main PySIT repository, create a branch for the feature or bug. If the bug has been reported, reference the issue number in the branch name.
  2. Develop your feature or fix the bug. In this branch, avoid any other changes that are not related.
  3. When you think your change is complete, or you have a question and want to initiate code review, pull the latest version of the develop branch in main PySIT repository into your local branch and resolve any merge conflicts.
  4. Push your changes to your fork on BitBucket.
  5. From BitBucket, issue a “pull request” from your feature branch to the develop branch of the main PySIT repository.
  6. Comments may be given. Address them locally and push them to your repository on GitHub. The pull request will update automatically.
  7. Once the pull request is accepted and merged, you may close your branch.
  8. Pull the upstream develop branch into your local develop branch.

Note

This is roughly the standard procedure used in most DVCS hosted projects. Improvements to the process are always welcome.

Coding Standards

  • We follow the Python PEP8 style guide.

    Note

    Older PySIT code still uses tabs for indentation of Python code blocks. These are being phased out. If you modify such a file, be careful to not mix conventions.

  • Class and function docstrings should follow the numpydoc conventions.

  • Test coverage is sparse. Try to include unit tests on new code and on bug fixes to help catch regression bugs. Improvement of test coverage is a major focus going forward.

  • Pull requests must include updates to the documentation. Run a spell checker.