Thank you for contributing to PyPWA! With the help of people like you, we can make PyPWA a great Python based Partial Wave Analysis and High Energy Physics toolkit.
You don't need to have any physics or programming experience to start contributing to PyPWA. If you are a physists who has never written code, a software developer with little physics background, or even a new student with little experience in either, we have projects that you can help us with.
If you want to help, or get help, lets us know in the Issues section!
If you have a feature request, discovered a bug, a flaw in the documentation, or a use-case where the toolkit runs slowly, please let us know in the Issue tracker on Github.
When you are making a new issue on Github, you'll have a choice between filing a bug report, feature request, or help request. Select which one you want, and we will get reply as quickly as we can.
PyPWA follows the PEP standard, which if you're using PyCharm the IDE should help you conform to the format if you're new to it. We also write all our documenation in numpydoc.
Any functions or objects that are meant to be used by the users should be imported directly into PyPWA/init.py and should be thoroughly documented including examples. If it's an internal function however, it should be moreso documentated in the code itself.
If you are working directly with us, and have access to the repository,
you will be forking all your branches off of the development branch.
All your additions will happen on that branch, and after your branch
passes reviews, you're branch will be merged into the development
branch to be included in the next release.
If you are a contributor from outside Jefferson Lab, please fork PyPWA,
make your changes to the development branch, and then submit a pull
request. We'll review your pull request, suggest changes, and then
accept your pull request.
We use PyTest for our testing. All code contributed to PyPWA should have
tests included in the fork or branch before it's merged into
development. This is so that we can continue to deliver as stable of
an experience as possible. We have no strict rules on the tests, but
please do your best to keep them short and concise.
When you are combining a feature, fix, or documentation branch into
PyPWA, you squash all commits into a single commit, and then merge into
development with complete patch notes. The command to do this from a
standard machine is git merge --squash. This is to prevent the git
log from being polluted with small uninformative commits, and to keep
tracking changes concise.
When preparing for a release, a release branch for the new release should be forked off of master, and all it's documentation should be updated for the new release version. This should also be used as a final attempt to catch any bugs that may have yet to been patched. Once all bugs are patched, documentation is updated, tests passing, that is when you would merge the branch into both master and development without squash. It is desirable to maintain the full git log from development when merging into master.