As a scientific community-driven software project, ArviZ.jl welcomes contributions from interested individuals or groups. These guidelines are provided to give potential contributors information to make their contribution compliant with the conventions of the ArviZ.jl project and maximize the probability of such contributions to be merged as quickly and efficiently as possible.
There are 4 main ways of contributing to the ArviZ.jl project (in descending order of difficulty or scope):
- Adding new or improved functionality to the existing codebase
- Fixing outstanding issues (bugs) with the existing codebase. They range from low-level software bugs to higher-level design problems.
- Contributing or improving the documentation (
docs
) or examples - Submitting issues related to bugs or desired enhancements
We appreciate being notified of problems with the existing ArviZ.jl code. We prefer that issues be filed the on Github Issue Tracker, rather than on social media or by direct email to the developers.
Please verify that your issue is not being currently addressed by other issues or pull requests by using the GitHub search tool to look for key words in the project issue tracker.
While issue reporting is valuable, we strongly encourage users who are inclined to do so to submit patches for new or existing issues via pull requests. This is particularly the case for simple fixes, such as typos or tweaks to documentation, which do not require a heavy investment of time and attention.
Contributors are also encouraged to contribute new code to enhance ArviZ.jl's functionality, also via pull requests. Please consult the ArviZ.jl documentation to ensure that any new contribution does not strongly overlap with existing functionality.
In general, new analysis tools such as plots, statistics, and diagnostics should be contributed directly to ArviZ. Julia-specific tools such as improvements to the API, documentation, custom types, conversion functions, and interfaces with other Julia packages should be added to ArviZ.jl.
The preferred workflow for contributing to ArviZ.jl is to fork the GitHub repository, clone it to your local machine, and develop on a feature branch.
For more instructions see the Pull request checklist.
To facilitate each transfer between platforms, ArviZ.jl should as much as possible keep the same interface, behavior, and style for official API functions as ArviZ.
For code generally follow the Julia style guide and the BlueStyle Guide, the latter taking precedence.
Before submission, final formatting should be done with JuliaFormatter.jl. For more detailed steps on a typical development workflow see the Pull request checklist.
Functions intended for use by a user must be documented and should follow the BlueStyle documentation guide. Please reasonably document any additions or changes to the codebase, when in doubt, add a docstring.
-
Fork the project repository by clicking on the 'Fork' button near the top right of the main repository page. This creates a copy of the code under your GitHub user account.
-
Clone your fork of the ArviZ.jl repo from your GitHub account to your local disk and add the base repository as a remote:
$ git clone [email protected]:<your GitHub handle>/ArviZ.jl.git $ cd ArviZ.jl $ git remote add upstream [email protected]:arviz-devs/ArviZ.jl.git
-
Create a
feature
branch to hold your development changes:$ git checkout -b my-feature
Always use a
feature
branch. It's good practice to never routinely work on themain
branch of any repository. -
Package dependencies are in
Project.toml
. To set up a development environment, from the Julia REPL, type]
to enter the Pkg REPL mode and runpkg> dev .
-
Develop the feature on your feature branch. Add changed files using
git add
and thengit commit
files:$ git add modified_files $ git commit
to record your changes locally. After committing, it is a good idea to sync with the base repository in case there have been any changes:
$ git fetch upstream $ git rebase upstream/main
Then push the changes to your GitHub account with:
$ git push -u origin my-feature
-
Go to the GitHub web page of your fork of the ArviZ.jl repo. Click the 'Pull request' button to send your changes to the project's maintainers for review. This will send an email to the committers.
We recommend that your contribution complies with the following guidelines before you submit a pull request:
- If your pull request addresses an issue, please use the pull request title to describe the issue and mention the issue number in the pull request description. This will make sure a link back to the original issue is created.
- All public methods must have informative docstrings with sample usage when appropriate.
- Please prefix the title of incomplete contributions with
[WIP]
(to indicate a work in progress). WIPs may be useful to (1) indicate you are working on something to avoid duplicated work, (2) request broad review of functionality or API, or (3) seek collaborators. - All other tests pass when everything is rebuilt from scratch.
- Documentation and high-coverage tests are necessary for enhancements to be accepted.
- Documentation follows BlueStyle guide.
- Code coverage cannot decrease. Coverage is automatically checked on all pull requests.
- Your code and documentation has been formatted with JuliaFormatter.jl with BlueStyle. From the ArviZ.jl repo, execute
$ julia -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.add("JuliaFormatter");
using JuliaFormatter; format(".")'