Contributing to pylibacl

Hi, and thanks for any and all contributions!

Bugs and patches

This is a small project, so let’s keep things simple:

  • Please file all bug reports on github (https://github.com/iustin/pylibacl/issues), as this allows archival and discovery by other people;

  • Send patches as pull requests; for larger changes, would be good to first open a bug to discuss the plans;

Due to simplicity, there are no old branches being kept alive, but if it ever happens that a bug is found in older versions and there is needed to support older Python versions, it is possible to do so.

Code standards

There are no formal standards, but:

  • Code should be tested - this is why there’s a Codecov integration.

  • New functions should have good docstrings (in the C code).

  • New functions/constants should be listed in the documentation, see doc/module.rst for how to include them.

  • All non-trivial changes should be listed in NEWS.md for further inclusion in new releases documentation. Add an “unreleased” section (if one doesn’t exist yet) to list the changes.

Release process

Right now, due to GPG signing, I’m doing releases and signing them manually (offline, I mean). Basically, once GitHub workflows are fine:

  • Bump the version in all places - use git grep -F $OLD_VER and update as needed.

  • Ensure that setup.py has the right Python versions listed (bit me more than once).

  • Update the NEWS.md file is up to date (contents), and use the right date.

  • Check that the generated documentation (make doc) looks right.

Then run these steps:

$ make clean
$ make distcheck # this leaves things in dist/
$ git tag -m 'Release pylibacl-0.0.1' --sign v0.0.1
$ gpg --sign -b -a dist/pylibacl-0.0.1.tar.gz
$ python3 -m twine upload dist/*

Separately:

Hopefully one day all this can be more automated.

Signing key

The releases are currently signed by my key, see https://k1024.org/contact/.