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Development#

Notes for developers. If you want to get involved, please do! We welcome all kinds of contributions, for example:

  • docs fixes/clarifications
  • bug reports
  • bug fixes
  • feature requests
  • pull requests
  • tutorials

Workflows#

We don't mind whether you use a branching or forking workflow. However, please only push to your own branches, pushing to other people's branches is often a recipe for disaster, is never required in our experience so is best avoided.

Try and keep your merge requests as small as possible (focus on one thing if you can). This makes life much easier for reviewers which allows contributions to be accepted at a faster rate.

Language#

We use British English for our development. We do this for consistency with the broader work context of our lead developers.

Versioning#

This package follows the version format described in PEP440 and Semantic Versioning to describe how the version should change depending on the updates to the code base. Our changelog entries and compiled CHANGELOG [TODO: docs explaining our CHANGELOG approach/reference to changelog/README.md] allow us to identify where key changes were made.

Dependency management#

We manage our dependencies using pixi. This allows us to use conda dependencies within our workflows. However, we also need to release packages for PyPI. To faciliate this, we use pdm. This is generally pretty straightforward as the two package managers don't fight each other. The key thing to check is that any dependencies which are listed in both project.dependencies and tool.pixi.dependencies should agree. This ensures that our conda and PyPI installs will target consistent versions of dependencies.

Releasing#

Releasing is semi-automated via a CI job. The CI job requires the type of version bump that will be performed to be manually specified. See the pdm-bump docs for the list of available bump rules.

Standard process#

The steps required are the following:

  1. Bump the version: manually trigger the "bump" workflow from the main branch (see here: bump workflow). A valid "bump_rule" (see pdm-bump's docs) will need to be specified. This will then trigger a draft release.

  2. Edit the draft release which has been created (see here: project releases). Once you are happy with the release (removed placeholders, added key announcements etc.) then hit 'Publish release'. This triggers a release to PyPI (which you can then add to the release if you want).

  3. That's it, release done, make noise on social media of choice, do whatever else

  4. Enjoy the newly available version

Read the Docs#

Our documentation is hosted by Read the Docs (RtD), a service for which we are very grateful. The RtD configuration can be found in the .readthedocs.yaml file in the root of this repository. The docs are automatically deployed at input4mips-validation.readthedocs.io.