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netcdf-c/CONTRIBUTING.md

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How to contribute

Thanks for your interest in contributing to the netCDF project. There are many different platforms and configurations which we don't have access to directly, and your contributions help ensure that things continue to run smoothly for all of our users. We'll strive to keep the process simple for you, the contributor, by establishing a handful of guidelines up front.

We will assume that you are familiar with git and GitHub. If not, you may go through the GitHub tutorial found at https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/. This tutorial should only take around 10 minutes.

Table of Contents

Workflow

The process for contributing a patch to netCDF roughly follows the following workflow:

This step is strongly encouraged. The larger the scope of the proposed change, the more likely it is that we will need to have a discussion about the ramifications before accepting the pull request. We don't want anybody to waste their time developing a patch only to have it rejected because we disagree with the premise or goal! By opening an issue you can start a public dialog with us about the proposed changes, ensuring that everybody is on the same page and that no time/effort will be wasted!

  • Fork the Unidata/netcdf-c repository.
  • Make the desired changes to the netcdf-c project.
  • Compile your code and test your changes. See the section on testing your changes below for more information; we provide a lot of options!
  • Push your changes to GitHub.
  • Issue a pull request.

Once a pull request has been received, it will be reviewed and evaluated by the netCDF developers at Unidata. If there are any questions or comments, they will be appended to the discussion area of the pull request.

The characteristics of an accepted pull request

Not every pull request is created equally; while we appreciate every contribution we receive, we do not accept them all. Those that we do accept generally have the following in common:

  • They possess a clear purpose - What is the point of the pull request? How does it benefit the netCDF community at large? If it is not beneficial in an apparent fashion, we will likely reject the pull request.
  • The code is documented - The netCDF developers must understand not only what a change is doing, but how it is doing it. Documenting your code makes it easier for us to understand the workflow of your patch. If we can't figure out how a patch works, we will ask for clarification before accepting it.
  • They pass QA - If new functionality has been added, corresponding unit tests have been created and wired in to the build systems. We do not expect you to perform comprehensive testing across a multitude of platforms, but at the very least your code should compile and no existing tests should be broken. A pull request that doesn't compile will be rejected on principle, and a pull request which breaks tests will have to be corrected before it is accepted. See "Testing your changes" below for more information.
  • They do not compromise the principles behind netCDF - NetCDF has a 100% iron-clad commitment to backwards compatibility. Any file ever created with netCDF must be readable by any future version of netCDF. The netCDF data models and file formats are well defined. If your purpose is to modify the data model or file format, please discuss this with us first. If we are in agreement regarding the changes, we will need to discuss how to add them as a new data-model/file-format. Similarly, netCDF has a commitment to remaining machine-independent; data created on one platform/environment/architecture must remain readable by any other libnetcdf compiled with similar functionality.

What about Typo/Bug Fixes/Incremental Fixes?

Many of the pull requests we receive do little other than to fix a typo or correct a bug in our code. This is great, and we encourage as many of these as we can get! "Fixing mistakes" falls within the principles guiding netCDF, and these changes are 1) Typically self-describing rarely result in any issues with QA

Testing your changes

There are several ways to test your changes to ensure that your pull request passes QA. There are manual spot-checks which test the code "on-the-spot", and there are automated continuous integration tests which will run and evaluate any contributes to ensure nothing breaks. Advanced users may also use Unidata-maintained Docker images for running regression tests.

Spot-check tests

  • make check if you are using configure/autotools.
  • make test if you are using cmake.

Continuous Integration testing with Travis CI

Travis CI is a system for providing automated continuous integration testing, without requiring any effort on the part of the contributor. Any time a change is pushed out to GitHub, a series of tests will run automatically and will ultimately report a success or a failure. You may view the Unidata Travis dashboard here. Each project listed may be "drilled down" into, where specific information may be found.

Regression testing with Docker

If you are not familiar with Docker, feel free to skip this section or read up on Docker at their website. If you are familiar with Docker, please read on.

We provide several Docker images for performing regression tests against netCDF-C. These tests build and test libnetcdf, and then use it as the basis for testing the following packages:

  • NetCDF-C++
  • NetCDF-Fortran
  • NetCDF-Python
  • NetCDF Operators (NCO)

By performing these comprehensive tests, we're able to see if any change in the core library results in unexpected behavior with the common interfaces. For full documentation, please see this page.

These tests will be run against any pull request submitted; you are encouraged to make use of them if you so like.

We are here to help

We want as many contributions as we can get, and are here to help ensure that your efforts are not wasted! We will work with you to ensure that your code works on more esoteric platforms (ARM, Windows) and that the pull request possesses the characteristics described above. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!