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Contributing to hmf

Thank you for considering contributing to hmf!

hmf is an open source project, and will only get better as the community of contributors grows. There are many ways to contribute, including writing tutorials, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests or writing code which can be incorporated into hmf itself. Following the guidelines and patterns suggested below helps us maintain a high quality code base and review your contributions faster.

How to report a bug

First check the issues to see if your bug already exists. Feel free to comment on the existing issue to provide more context or just to note that it is affecting you as well. If your bug is not in the issue list, make a new issue.

When making an issue, try to provide as much context as possible including:

  1. What version of python and hmf are you using?
  2. What operating system are you using?
  3. What did you do?
  4. What did you expect to see?
  5. What did you see instead?
  6. Any code to reproduce the bug (as minimal an example as possible)

If you're really inspired, you can make a pull request adding a test that fails because of the bug. This is likely to lead to the bug being fixed more quickly.

How to suggest a feature or enhancement

First check the issues to see if your feature request already exists. Feel free to comment on the existing issue to provide more context or just to note that you would like to see the feature implemented as well. If your feature request is not in the issue list, make a new issue.

When making a feature request, try to provide as much context as possible. Feel free to include suggestions for implementations.

Guidelines for contributing to the code

  • Create issues for any major changes and enhancements that you wish to make. Discuss things transparently and get community feedback.
  • Keep pull requests as small as possible. Ideally each pull request should implement ONE feature or bugfix. If you want to add or fix more than one thing, submit more than one pull request.
  • Do not commit changes to files that are irrelevant to your feature or bugfix.
  • Be aware that the pull request review process is not immediate, and is generally proportional to the size of the pull request.

Your First Contribution

Contributing for the first time can seem daunting, but we value contributions from our user community and we will do our best to help you through the process. Here’s some advice to help make your work on hmf more useful and rewarding.

  • Use issue labels to guide you
    • Unsure where to begin contributing to hmf? You can start by looking through issues labeled good first issue and help wanted issues.
  • Pick a subject area that you care about, that you are familiar with, or that you want to learn about
    • There are many aspects to hmf, from cosmography, through cosmological initial conditions, through to filter functions and fitting functions. Choose the one you're most interested in!
  • Start small
    • It’s easier to get feedback on a little issue or pull request than on a big one.
  • If you’re going to take on a big change, make sure that your idea has support first
    • This means getting someone else to confirm that a bug is real before you fix the issue, and ensuring that there’s consensus on a proposed feature before you work to implement it. Use the issue log to start conversations about major changes and enhancements.
  • Be bold! Leave feedback!
    • Sometimes it can be scary to make new issues or comment on existing issues or pull requests, but contributions from the wider community are what ensure that hmf serves the whole community as well as possible.
  • Be rigorous
    • Our requirements on code style, testing and documentation are important. If you have questions about them or difficulty meeting them, please ask for help, we will do our best to support you. Your contributions will be reviewed and integrated much more quickly if your pull request meets the requirements.

If you are new to the GitHub or the pull request process you can start by taking a look at these tutorials: http://makeapullrequest.com/ and http://www.firsttimersonly.com/. If you have more questions, feel free to ask for help, everyone is a beginner at first and all of us are still learning!

Getting started

  1. Create your own fork or branch of the code.
  2. Follow the [Developer Installation](INSTALLATION.rst) instructions to ensure that you have all the required packages for testing your changes.
  3. Run pre-commit install to enable code-quality checks.
  4. Make the changes in your fork or branch.
5. If you like the change and think the project could use it:
  • If you're fixing a bug, include a new test that breaks as a result of the bug (if possible).
  • Ensure that all your new code is covered by tests and that the existing tests pass. Tests can be run by running pytest in the top level hmf directory.
  • Ensure that you fully document any new features via docstrings, and potentially as a new tutorial in the docs/ directory.
  1. Make a Pull Request from your fork/branch.

Code review process

The core team looks at pull requests on a regular basis and tries to provide feedback as quickly as possible. Larger pull requests generally require more time for review.

Release Cycle and Versioning

hmf uses git-flow and GitHub to manage releases. This means it

In this workflow, master is protected and commits may not be pushed to it directly, but must first undergo testing and review via a Pull Request.

From v3.1.0, hmf will be using strict semantic versioning, such that increases in the major version have potential API breaking changes, minor versions introduce new features, and patch versions fix bugs and other non-breaking internal changes.

Releases will be cut on the following timescales:

  • Major versions: no more than one each six months -- aiming for one per year or less.
  • Minor versions: no more than one each two months.
  • Patch versions: no restrictions.

Note that patches will generally not be applied to previous major or minor versions.

To cut a release, maintainers do the following:

  1. Ensure all relevant branches have been merged to master
  2. Checkout master
  3. Check all commits since last tag: git log $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)..HEAD --oneline
  4. If a feature commit is present, bump the minor version. If a BREAKING CHANGE is present, bump the major version. Otherwise, bump the patch version.
  5. Create a new branch named vX.Y.Zdev with the proper bump.
  6. Update the changelog and check any other things that need to be fixed.
  7. Push the branch
  8. Merge to master
  9. Run git tag vX.Y.Z.

This is very simple, and doesn't support adding fixes to the current release if a feature or breaking change has been merged to master in the meantime. This may be updated in the future.