Contributing¶

This page contains a summary of what one needs to do to contribute.

Guidelines¶

Essentials for contributing¶

Contributor License Agreement¶

In order to become a contributor of giotto-tda, the first step is to sign the contributor license agreement (CLA). NOTE: Only original source code from you and other people that have signed the CLA can be accepted into the main repository.

Pull requests¶

If you have improvements to giotto-tda, do not hesitate to send us pull requests! Please follow the Github how to and make sure you followed this checklist before submitting yor pull request:

Make sure you have signed the contributor license agreement (CLA).
Read the Contribution guidelines and standards.
Read the code of conduct.
Check that the changes are consistent with the guidelines and coding styles.
Run unit tests.

The giotto-tda team will review your pull requests. Once the pull requests are approved and pass continuous integration checks, the giotto-tda team will work on getting your pull request submitted to our GitHub repository. Eventually, your pull request will be merged automatically on GitHub.

Issues¶

If you would like to know how you can contribute to the giotto-tda codebase, we recommend that you navigate to the GitHub issue tab and start looking through interesting issues. If you decide to start working on an issue, leave a comment so that other people know that you’re working on it. If you want to help out, but not alone, use the issue comment thread to coordinate.

Contribution guidelines and standards¶

Before sending your pull request for review, make sure your changes are consistent with the guidelines and follow the coding style below.

General guidelines and philosophy for contribution¶

Include unit tests when you contribute new features, as they help to a) prove that your code works correctly, and b) guard against future breaking changes to lower the maintenance cost.
Bug fixes also generally require unit tests, because the presence of bugs usually indicates insufficient test coverage.
Keep API compatibility in mind when you change code in core giotto-tda.
Clearly define your exceptions using the utils functions and test the exceptions.
When you contribute a new feature to giotto-tda, the maintenance burden is (by default) transferred to the giotto-tda team. This means that the benefit of the contribution must be compared against the cost of maintaining the feature.

C++ coding style¶

Changes to giotto-tda’s C/C++ code should conform to Google C++ Style Guide. Use clang-tidy to check your C/C++ changes. As an example, to install clang-tidy on Ubuntu 16.04, do:

apt-get install -y clang-tidy

You can check a C/C++ file by running:

clang-format <my_cc_file> --style=google > /tmp/my_cc_file.ccdiff <my_cc_file> /tmp/my_cc_file.cc

Python coding style¶

Whenever possible, changes to giotto-tda’s Python code should conform to PEP8 directives. Use flake8 to check your Python changes. To install flake8 just do

pip install flake8

You can use flake8 on your python code via the following instructions:

flake8 name_of_your_script.py

Git pre-commit hook¶

We provide a pre-commit git hook to prevent accidental commits to the master branch. To activate, run

cd .git/hooks
ln -s ../../.tools/git-pre-commit pre-commit

Running unit tests¶

There are two ways to run unit tests for giotto-tda.

Using tools and libraries installed directly on your system. giotto-tda relies on pytest. To install pytest just run

pip install pytest

You can use pytest on your python code via the following instructions:

pytest name_of_your_script.py

Using Azure and giotto-tda’s CI scripts.