Contributing

Welcome to polyphy contributor’s guide.

• This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.
• If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp 1.
• Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation’s Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports

• If you experience bugs or general issues with polyphy, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don’t see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

Tip:
Please don’t forget to include the closed issues in your search. Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered solved.

• New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation Improvements

• You can help improve polyphy docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

• polyphy documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.

  e.g., reStructuredText or CommonMark with MyST extensions.

Tip: Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way to propose changes in Polyphy’s files. While this mechanism can be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs and can be quite handy.

If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to the docs folder in the source repository, find which file you would like to propose changes, and click on the little pencil icon at the top to open GitHub’s code editor. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes you have made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal.

• When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using tox:

tox -e docs

and use Python’s built-in web server for a preview in your web browser (http://localhost:8000):

python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'

Code Contributions

An architecture description, design principles or at least a summary of the main concepts will make it easy for potential contributors to get started quickly.

Submit an issue

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it’s best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.

Create an environment

• Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can easily be done via either virtualenv:

virtualenv <PATH TO VENV>
source <PATH TO VENV>/bin/activate

or Miniconda:

conda create -n polyphy python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate polyphy

Clone the repository

1. Create an user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitHub.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

git clone [email protected]:YourLogin/polyphy.git
cd polyphy

4. You should run: To be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL.

pip install -U pip setuptools -e .