Skip to content

STMTools Contributing Guidelines

We welcome any kind of contribution to our software, from a simple comment or question to a full fledged pull request. Please read and follow our Code of Conduct.

A contribution can be one of the following cases:

  • you have a question;
  • you think you may have found a bug (including unexpected behavior);
  • you want to make some kind of change to the code base (e.g. to fix a bug, to add a new feature, to update documentation).

The sections below outline the steps in each case.

You have a question

  • use the search functionality in GitHub issue to see if someone already filed the same issue;
  • if your issue search did not yield any relevant results, create a new issue;
  • add the "question" label; include other labels when relevant.

You think you may have found a bug

  • use the search functionality in GitHub issue to see if someone already filed the same issue;
  • if your issue search did not yield any relevant results, create a new issue, making sure to provide enough information to the rest of the community to understand the cause and context of the problem. Depending on the issue, you may want to include:
    • the SHA hashcode of the commit that is causing your problem;
    • some identifying information (name and version number) for dependencies you're using;
    • information about the operating system;
  • add relevant labels to the newly created issue.

You want to make some kind of change to the code base

  • (important) announce your plan to the rest of the community before you start working. This announcement should be in the form of a (new) issue;
  • (important) wait until some kind of consensus is reached about your idea being a good idea;
  • if needed, fork the repository to your own Github profile and create your own feature branch off of the latest master commit. While working on your feature branch, make sure to stay up to date with the master branch by pulling in changes, possibly from the 'upstream' repository (follow the instructions from GitHub: instruction 1: configuring a remote for a fork and instruction 2: syncing a fork);
  • make sure the existing tests still work by running, e.g. pytest tests;
  • add your own tests (if necessary);
  • update or expand the documentation;
  • make sure the linting tests pass by running ruff in the project root directory: ruff check .;
  • push your feature branch to (your fork of) the stmtools repository on GitHub;
  • create the pull request, e.g. following the instructions: creating a pull request.

In case you feel like you've made a valuable contribution, but you don't know how to write or run tests for it, or how to generate the documentation: don't let this discourage you from making the pull request; we can help you! Just go ahead and submit the pull request, but keep in mind that you might be asked to append additional commits to your pull request.

In case you want to add documentation and you don't have mkdocs installed in your root environment, you can install it by calling pip install -e .[docs]. You can then test your documentation by calling mkdocs serve.