Contributing

This document is highly inspired from the Celery documentation.

Welcome to CDR-Stats!

This document is fairly extensive and you are not really expected to study this in detail for small contributions;

The most important rule is that contributing must be easy and that the community is friendly and not nitpicking on details such as coding style.

If you’re reporting a bug you should read the Reporting bugs section below to ensure that your bug report contains enough information to successfully diagnose the issue, and if you’re contributing code you should try to mimic the conventions you see surrounding the code you are working on, but in the end all patches will be cleaned up by the person merging the changes so don’t worry too much.

Community Code of Conduct

The goal is to maintain a diverse community that is pleasant for everyone. That is why we would greatly appreciate it if everyone contributing to and interacting with the community also followed this Code of Conduct.

The Code of Conduct covers our behavior as members of the community, in any forum, mailing list, wiki, website, Internet relay chat (IRC), public meeting or private correspondence.

The Code of Conduct is heavily based on the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Celery Code of Conduct, and the Pylons Code of Conduct.

Be considerate.

Your work will be used by other people, and you in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and we expect you to take those consequences into account when making decisions. Even if it’s not obvious at the time, our contributions to CDR-Stats will impact the work of others. For example, changes to code, infrastructure, policy, documentation and translations during a release may negatively impact others work.

Be respectful.

The CDR-Stats community and its members treat one another with respect. Everyone can make a valuable contribution to CDR-Stats. We may not always agree, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. We expect members of the CDR-Stats community to be respectful when dealing with other contributors as well as with people outside the CDR-Stats project and with users of CDR-Stats.

Be collaborative.

Collaboration is central to CDR-Stats and to the larger free software community. We should always be open to collaboration. Your work should be done transparently and patches from CDR-Stats should be given back to the community when they are made, not just when the distribution releases. If you wish to work on new code for existing upstream projects, at least keep those projects informed of your ideas and progress. It many not be possible to get consensus from upstream, or even from your colleagues about the correct implementation for an idea, so don’t feel obliged to have that agreement before you begin, but at least keep the outside world informed of your work, and publish your work in a way that allows outsiders to test, discuss and contribute to your efforts.

When you disagree, consult others.

Disagreements, both political and technical, happen all the time and the CDR-Stats community is no exception. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively and with the help of the community and community process. If you really want to go a different way, then we encourage you to make a derivative distribution or alternate set of packages that still build on the work we’ve done to utilize as common of a core as possible.

When you are unsure, ask for help.

Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect. Asking questions avoids many problems down the road, and so questions are encouraged. Those who are asked questions should be responsive and helpful. However, when asking a question, care must be taken to do so in an appropriate forum.

Step down considerately.

Developers on every project come and go and CDR-Stats is no different. When you leave or disengage from the project, in whole or in part, we ask that you do so in a way that minimizes disruption to the project. This means you should tell people you are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where you leave off.

Reporting Bugs

Bugs

Bugs can always be described to the Mailing list, but the best way to report an issue and to ensure a timely response is to use the issue tracker.

  1. Create a GitHub account.

You need to create a GitHub account to be able to create new issues and participate in the discussion.

  1. Determine if your bug is really a bug.

You should not file a bug if you are requesting support. For that you can use the Mailing list, or IRC.

  1. Make sure your bug hasn’t already been reported.

Search through the appropriate Issue tracker. If a bug like yours was found, check if you have new information that could be reported to help the developers fix the bug.

  1. Check if you’re using the latest version.

A bug could be fixed by some other improvements and fixes - it might not have an existing report in the bug tracker. Make sure you’re using the latest version.

  1. Collect information about the bug.

To have the best chance of having a bug fixed, we need to be able to easily reproduce the conditions that caused it. Most of the time this information will be from a Python traceback message, though some bugs might be in design, spelling or other errors on the website/docs/code.

  1. If the error is from a Python traceback, include it in the bug report.
  2. We also need to know what platform you’re running (Windows, OS X, Linux, etc.), the version of your Python interpreter, and the version of related packages that you were running when the bug occurred.
  1. Submit the bug.

By default GitHub will email you to let you know when new comments have been made on your bug. In the event you’ve turned this feature off, you should check back on occasion to ensure you don’t miss any questions a developer trying to fix the bug might ask.

Issue Trackers

Bugs for a package in the CDR-Stats ecosystem should be reported to the relevant issue tracker.

If you are unsure of the origin of the bug you can ask the Mailing list, or just use the CDR-Stats issue tracker.

Versions

Version numbers consists of a major version, minor version and a release number. We use the versioning semantics described by semver: http://semver.org.

Stable releases are published at PyPI while development releases are only available in the GitHub git repository as tags. All version tags starts with “v”, so version 0.8.0 is the tag v0.8.0.

Branches

Current active version branches:

You can see the state of any branch by looking at the Changelog:

Feature branches

Major new features are worked on in dedicated branches. There is no strict naming requirement for these branches.

Feature branches are removed once they have been merged into a release branch.

Tags

Tags are used exclusively for tagging releases. A release tag is named with the format vX.Y.Z, e.g. v2.3.1. Experimental releases contain an additional identifier vX.Y.Z-id, e.g. v3.0.0-rc1. Experimental tags may be removed after the official release.

Working on Features & Patches

Note

Contributing to CDR-Stats should be as simple as possible, so none of these steps should be considered mandatory.

You can even send in patches by email if that is your preferred work method. We won’t like you any less, any contribution you make is always appreciated!

However following these steps may make maintainers life easier, and may mean that your changes will be accepted sooner.

Forking and setting up the repository

First you need to fork the repository, a good introduction to this is in the Github Guide: Fork a Repo.

After you have cloned the repository you should checkout your copy to a directory on your machine:

$ git clone git@github.com:username/cdr-stats.git

When the repository is cloned enter the directory to set up easy access to upstream changes:

$ cd cdr-stats
$ git remote add upstream git://github.com/cdr-stats/cdr-stats.git
$ git fetch upstream

If you need to pull in new changes from upstream you should always use the --rebase option to git pull:

$ git pull --rebase upstream master

With this option you don’t clutter the history with merging commit notes. See Rebasing merge commits in git. If you want to learn more about rebasing see the Rebase section in the Github guides.

If you need to work on a different branch than master you can fetch and checkout a remote branch like this:

$ git checkout --track -b 3.0-devel origin/3.0-devel

Running the unit test suite

To run the CDR-Stats test suite you need to install a few dependencies. A complete list of the dependencies needed are located in requirements/test.txt.

Installing the test requirements:

$ pip install -U -r requirements/test.txt

When installation of dependencies is complete you can execute the test suite by calling py.test:

$ py.test

Some useful options to py.test are:

  • -x

    Exit instantly on first error or failed test.

  • --ipdb

    Starts the interactive IPython debugger on errors.

  • -k EXPRESSION

    Only run tests which match the given substring expression.

  • -v

    Increase verbose.

If you want to run the tests for a single test file only you can do so like this:

$ py.test appointment./tests.py

Creating pull requests

When your feature/bugfix is complete you may want to submit a pull requests so that it can be reviewed by the maintainers.

Creating pull requests is easy, and also let you track the progress of your contribution. Read the Pull Requests section in the Github Guide to learn how this is done.

You can also attach pull requests to existing issues by following the steps outlined here: http://bit.ly/koJoso

Calculating test coverage

To calculate test coverage you must first install the coverage module.

Installing the coverage module:

$ pip install -U coverage

Code coverage in HTML:

$ nosetests --with-coverage --cover-html

The coverage output will then be located at cdr-stats/tests/cover/index.html.

Code coverage in XML (Cobertura-style):

$ nosetests --with-coverage --cover-xml --cover-xml-file=coverage.xml

The coverage XML output will then be located at coverage.xml

Running the tests on all supported Python versions

There is a tox configuration file in the top directory of the distribution.

To run the tests for all supported Python versions simply execute:

$ tox

If you only want to test specific Python versions use the -e option:

$ tox -e py27

Building the documentation

To build the documentation you need to install the dependencies listed in requirements/docs.txt:

$ pip install -U -r requirements/docs.txt

After these dependencies are installed you should be able to build the docs by running:

$ cd docs
$ rm -rf .build
$ make html

Make sure there are no errors or warnings in the build output. After building succeeds the documentation is available at .build/html.

Verifying your contribution

To use these tools you need to install a few dependencies. These dependencies can be found in requirements/pkgutils.txt.

Installing the dependencies:

$ pip install -U -r requirements/pkgutils.txt

pyflakes & PEP8

To ensure that your changes conform to PEP8 and to run pyflakes execute:

$ flake8 cdr_stats

Coding Style

You should probably be able to pick up the coding style from surrounding code, but it is a good idea to be aware of the following conventions.

  • All Python code must follow the PEP-8 guidelines.

pep8.py is an utility you can use to verify that your code is following the conventions.

  • Docstrings must follow the PEP-257 conventions, and use the following style.

    Do this:

    def method(self, arg):
        """Short description.
    
        More details.
    
        """
    

    or:

    def method(self, arg):
        """Short description."""
    

    but not this:

    def method(self, arg):
        """
        Short description.
        """
    
  • Lines should not exceed 78 columns.

    You can enforce this in vim by setting the textwidth option:

    set textwidth=78
    

    If adhering to this limit makes the code less readable, you have one more character to go on, which means 78 is a soft limit, and 79 is the hard limit :)

  • Import order

    • Python standard library (import xxx)
    • Python standard library (‘from xxx import`)
    • Third party packages.
    • Other modules from the current package.

    or in case of code using Django:

    • Python standard library (import xxx)
    • Python standard library (‘from xxx import`)
    • Third party packages.
    • Django packages.
    • Other modules from the current package.

    Within these sections the imports should be sorted by module name.

    Example:

    import threading
    import time
    
    from collections import deque
    from Queue import Queue, Empty
    
    from .datastructures import TokenBucket
    from .five import zip_longest, items, range
    from .utils import timeutils
    
  • Wildcard imports must not be used (from xxx import *).

  • For distributions where Python 2.5 is the oldest support version additional rules apply:

    • Absolute imports must be enabled at the top of every module:

      from __future__ import absolute_import
      
    • If the module uses the with statement and must be compatible with Python 2.5 then it must also enable that:

      from __future__ import with_statement
      
    • Every future import must be on its own line, as older Python 2.5 releases did not support importing multiple features on the same future import line:

      # Good
      from __future__ import absolute_import
      from __future__ import with_statement
      
      # Bad
      from __future__ import absolute_import, with_statement
      

    (Note that this rule does not apply if the package does not include support for Python 2.5)

  • Note that we use “new-style` relative imports when the distribution does not support Python versions below 2.5

    This requires Python 2.5 or later:

    from . import submodule
    

Contacts

This is a list of people that can be contacted for questions regarding the official git repositories, PyPI packages Read the Docs pages.

If the issue is not an emergency then it is better to report an issue.

Website

The CDR-Stats Project is run and maintained by

Release Procedure

Updating the version number

The version number must be updated one place:

  • cdr_stats/cdr_stats/__init__.py

After you have changed these files you must render the README files. There is a script to convert sphinx syntax to generic reStructured Text syntax, and the make target readme does this for you:

$ make readme

Now commit the changes:

$ git commit -a -m "Bumps version to X.Y.Z"

and make a new version tag:

$ git tag vX.Y.Z
$ git push --tags

Releasing

Commands to make a new public stable release:

$ make distcheck  # checks pep8, autodoc index, runs tests and more
$ make dist  # NOTE: Runs git clean -xdf and removes files not in the repo.
$ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel upload  # Upload package to PyPI

If this is a new release series then you also need to do the following: