Getting Involved

Note

The development of palace is carried out on GitHub. Since GitHub is not free software, we fully understand if one does not want to register an account just to participate in our development. Therefore, we also welcome patches and bug reports sent via email.

First of all, thank you for using and contributing to palace! We welcome all forms of contribution, and the mo the merier. By saying this, we also mean that we much prefer receiving many small and self-contained bug reports, feature requests and patches than a giant one. There is no limit for the number of contributions one may or should make. While it may seem appealing to be able to dump all thoughts and feelings into one ticket, it would be more difficult for us to keep track of the progress.

Reporting a Bug

Before filing a bug report, please make sure that the bug has not been already reported by searching our GitHub Issues tracker.

To facilitate the debugging process, a bug report should at least contain the following information:

  1. The platform, the CPython version and the compiler used to build it. These can be obtained from platform.platform(), platform.python_version() and platform.python_compiler(), respectively.

  2. The version of palace and how you installed it. The earlier is usually provided by pip show palace.

  3. Detailed instructions on how to reproduce the bug, for example a short Python script would be appreciated.

Requesting a Feature

Prior to filing a feature request, please make sure that the feature has not been already reported by searching our GitHub Issues tracker.

Please only ask for features that you (or an incapacitated friend you can personally talk to) require. Do not request features because they seem like a good idea. If they are really useful, they will be requested by someone who requires them.

Submitting a Patch

We accept all kinds of patches, from documentation and CI/CD setup to bug fixes, feature implementations and tests. These are hosted on GitHub and one may create a local repository by running:

git clone https://github.com/McSinyx/palace

While the patch can be submitted via email, it is preferable to file a pull request on GitHub against the master branch to allow more people to review it, since we do not have any mail list. Either way, contributors must have legal permission to distribute the code and it must be available under LGPLv3+. Furthermore, each contributor retains the copyrights of their patch, to ensure that the licence can never be revoked even if others wants to. It is advisable that the author list per legal name under the copyright header of each source file they modify, like so:

Copyright (C) 2038  Foo Bar

Using GitHub

  1. Create a fork of our repository on GitHub.

  2. Checkout the source code and (optionally) add the upstream remote:

    git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/palace
cd palace
git remote add upstream https://github.com/McSinyx/palace

  3. Start working on your patch and make sure your code complies with the Style Guidelines and passes the test suit run by tox.

  4. Add relevant tests to the patch and work on it until they all pass. In case one is only modifying tests, perse may install palace using CYTHON_TRACE=1 pip install . then run pytest directly to avoid having to build the extension module multiple times.

  5. Update the copyright notices of the files you modified. Palace is collectively licensed under LGPLv3+, and to protect the freedom of the users, copyright holders need to be properly documented.

  6. Add, commit with a great message then push the result.

  7. Finally, create a pull request. We will then review and merge it.

It is recommended to create a new branch in your fork (git checkout -c what-you-are-working-on) instead of working directly on master. This way one can still sync per fork with our master branch and git pull --rebase upstream master to avoid integration issues.

Via Email

  1. Checkout the source code:

    git clone https://github.com/McSinyx/palace
cd palace

  2. Work on your patch with tests and copyright notice included as described above.

  3. git-format-patch and send it to one of the maintainers (our emails addresses are available under git log). We will then review and merge it.

In any case, thank you very much for your contributions!

Making a Release

While this is meant for developers doing a palace release, contributors wishing to improve the CI/CD may find it helpful.

  1. Under the local repository, checkout the master branch and sync with the one on GitHub using git pull.

  2. Bump the version in setup.cfg and push to GitHub.

  3. Create a source distribution by running setup.py sdist. The distribution generated by this command is now referred to as sdist.

  4. Using twine, upload the sdist to PyPI via twine upload $sdist.

  5. On GitHub, tag a new release with the sdist attached. In the release note, make sure to include all user-facing changes since the previous release. This will trigger the CD services to build the wheels and publish them to PyPI.

  6. Wait for the wheel for your platform to arrive to PyPI and install it. Play around with it for a little to make sure that everything is OK.

Style Guidelines

Python and Cython

Generally, palace follows PEP 8 and PEP 257, with the following preferences and exceptions:

  • Hanging indentation is always preferred, where continuation lines are indented by 4 spaces.

  • Comments and one-line docstrings are limited to column 79 instead of 72 like for multi-line docstrings.

  • Cython extern declarations need not follow the 79-character limit.

  • Break long lines before a binary operator.

  • Use form feeds sparingly to break long modules into pages of relating functions and classes.

  • Prefer single-quoted strings over double-quoted strings, unless the string contains single quote characters.

  • Avoid trailing commas at all costs.

  • Line breaks within comments and docstrings should not cut a phrase in half.

  • Everything deserves a docstring. Palace follows numpydoc which support documenting attributes as well as constants and module-level variables. In additional to docstrings, type annotations should be employed for all public names.

  • Use numpydoc markups moderately to keep docstrings readable as plain text.

C++

C++ codes should follow GNU style, which is best documented at Octave.

reStructuredText

In order for reStructuredText to be rendered correctly, the body of constructs beginning with a marker (lists, hyperlink targets, comments, etc.) must be aligned relative to the marker. For this reason, it is convenient to set your editor indentation level to 3 spaces, since most constructs starts with two dots and a space. However, be aware of that bullet items require 2-space alignment and other exceptions.

Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters. Similar to comments and docstrings, phrases should not be broken in the middle. The source code of this guide itself is a good example on how line breaks should be handled. Additionally, two spaces should also be used after a sentence-ending period in multi-sentence paragraph, except after the final sentence.