We welcome third-party contributions, and we would love you to become an active contributor!
Software contributions are made via GitHub pull requests to https://github.com/devitocodes/devito. If you are planning a large contribution, we encourage you to engage with us frequently to ensure that your effort is well-directed. See below for more details.
Devito is distributed under the MIT License, https://github.com/devitocodes/devito/blob/master/LICENSE.md. The act of submitting a pull request or patch (with or without an explicit Signed-off-by tag) will be understood as an affirmation of the following:
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file; or
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source license and I have the right under that license to submit that work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part by me, under the same open source license (unless I am permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated in the file; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified it.
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with this project or the open source license(s) involved.
There are several options:
- Talk to us. You can join our Slack team via this link. Should you have installation issues, or should you bump into something that appears to be a Devito-related bug, do not hesitate to get in touch. We are always keen to help out.
- File an issue on our GitHub page.
First of all, read of code of conduct and make sure you agree with it.
The protocol to propose a patch is:
- [Recommended, but not compulsory] Talk to us on Slack about what you're trying to do. There is a great chance we can support you.
- As soon as you know what you need to do, fork Devito.
- Create a branch with a suitable name.
- Write code following the guidelines below. Commit your changes as small logical units.
- Commit messages must adhere to the format specified here. We may ask you to rebase the commit history if it looks too messy.
- Write tests to convince us and yourself that what you've done works as expected. Commit them.
- Run the entire test suite, including the new tests, to make sure that you haven't accidentally broken anything else.
- Push everything to your Devito fork.
- Submit a Pull Request on our repository.
- Wait for us to provide feedback. This may require a few iterations.
Tip, especially for newcomers: prefer short, self-contained Pull Requests over lengthy, impenetrable, and thus difficult to review, ones.
Some coding rules are "enforced" (and automatically checked by our Continuous Integration systems), some are "strongly recommended", others are "optional" but welcome.
- We enforce PEP8, with a few exceptions, listed here
- We enforce a maximum line length of 90 characters.
- We enforce indentation via 4 spaces.
- We suggest to use
flake8
to check the above points locally, before filing a Pull Request. - We strongly recommend to document any new module, class, routine, ... with NumPy-like docstrings ("numpydoc").
- We strongly recommend imports to be at the top of a module, logically grouped and, within each group, to be alphabetically ordered. As an example, condider our init.py: the first group is imports from the standard library; then imports from third-party dependencies; finally, imports from devito modules.
- We strongly recommend to follow standard Python coding guidelines:
- Use camel caps for class names, e.g.
class FooBar
. - Method names must start with a small letter; use underscores to separate words, e.g.
def _my_meth_...
. - Private class attributes and methods must start with an underscore.
- Variable names should be explicative (Devito prefers "long and clear" over "short but unclear").
- Comment your code, and do not be afraid of being verbose. The first letter must be capitalized. Do not use punctuation (unless the comment consists of multiple sentences).
- Use camel caps for class names, e.g.
- We like that blank lines are used to logically split blocks of code implementing different (possibly sequential) tasks.
We always look forward to extending our suite of tutorials and examples with new Jupyter Notebooks. Even something completely new, such as a new series of tutorials showing your work with Devito, would be a great addition.