How to Contribute

How to Contribute#

License#

NMMA is released under the MIT license, which means that you are allowed to modify the code for your own purposes, as long as you retain our copyright notice.

However, we would love to grow the NMMA community, and integrate improvements directly into our code repository on GitHub.

Including your changes#

To make a code contribution to the project, follow these steps (which are outlined in more detail in this GitHub guide):

  1. Make a fork of the NMMA repository

  2. Clone your fork, and add upstream (git@github.com:nuclear-multimessenger-astronomy/nmma) as a remote

  3. Create a new branch and add your feature

  4. Submit a pull request (PR) on GitHub

The other developers will provide feedback, and you may push updates into the same branch (which will also update your pull request), until the Continuous Integration tests pass and reviewers agree that it should be merged (see “Process Guidelines: Reviews” below).

For a more detailed explanation of the open contribution process, see the scikit-image contributors’ guide. We follow a very similar process; some guidance follows below.

Bug Reports#

While we appreciate code changes, it is also very helpful simply to know when NMMA does not function correctly. Please file any issues you run across.

If possible, provide:

  1. A full description of your environment, including operating system, and Python version.

  2. A minimal way to reproduce the problem you see; these can be either a set of instructions, or a script.

Process guidelines#

Because many developers work on NMMA, and PRs sometimes come in at a rapid pace, we have guidelines to streamline review and development:

Code style#

We don’t like arguing about code style, and likely you don’t either. Therefore, we use code formatters: black for Python. Code is an art, and opinions differ of what looks good: we choose to spend our time writing correct, elegant code.

Testing#

All functionality should be accompanied by tests. We use pytest and PRs can only be merged once tests have been added and pass. The continuous integration system indicates this with a green checkmark, hence you may see developers talking about “PR 599 being green” ✅. You can also run tests locally by running pytest nmma/tests/*.py from the main nmma directory.

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