Contributing¶

Welcome to formparse contributor’s guide.

This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.

If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp.

Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation’s Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports¶

If you experience bugs or general issues with formparse, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don’t see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

Tip

Please don’t forget to include the closed issues in your search. Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered solved.

New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation Improvements¶

You can help improve formparse docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

formparse documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution. We are using reStructuredText for our documents.

Tip

Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way of propose changes in formparse’s files. While this mechanism can be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs, and can be quite handy.

If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to the docs folder in the source repository, find which file you would like to propose changes and click in the little pencil icon at the top, to open GitHub’s code editor. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes have you made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal.

When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using Sphinx:

sphinx-build docs docs/_build

and use Python’s built-in web server for a preview in your web browser (http://localhost:8000):

python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'

Code Contributions¶

formparse is built using Pythons ast module which parses the input of a formula as if it were Python code and then only enables the operations that we want to support and that are safe to use.

Submit an issue¶

For every submission that is not trivial, e.g. a simple typo, we’d like you to create an issue in our issue tracker. At the begining of the PR name, please add either feat:, fix: or chore, depending if it is a new feature, a bug fix or a chore.

Create an environment¶

Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can easily be done via venv:

python -m venv <PATH TO VENV>
source <PATH TO VENV>/bin/activate

Clone the repository¶

Create an user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.
Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitHub.

Clone this copy to your local disk:

git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/formparse.git
cd formparse

You should run:
```
pip install -U pip setuptools -e .
```
to be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL.

Implement your changes¶

Create an issues or reference an existing one. We think that every PR should be matched to an issue. This allows discussion and avoids that two people work on the same feature without their knowledge. Check also the section about creating issues.
Create a branch to hold your changes:
```
git checkout -b <issue-number>-my-feature
```
and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!
Start your work on this branch. Don’t forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.
Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.rst.
When you’re done editing, do:
```
git add <MODIFIED FILES>
git commit
```
to record your changes in git. Please start every commit message with #<issue-number> to ensure we can match your commits to a issue after merging (in case we don’t squash it).
Important

Don’t forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.

Moreover, writing a descriptive commit message is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:
```
git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all
```
to look for recurring communication patterns.
Please check that your changes don’t break any unit tests with:
```
pip install -e . && python -m unittest discover tests
```

Submit your contribution¶

If everything works fine, push your local branch to GitHub with:
```
git push -u origin my-feature
```
Go to the web page of your fork and click “Create pull request” to send your changes for review.

Find more detailed information in creating a PR. You might also want to open the PR as a draft first and mark it as ready for review after the feedbacks from the continuous integration (CI) system or any required fixes.

Troubleshooting¶

The following tips can be used when facing problems to build or test the package:

Make sure to fetch all the tags from the upstream repository. The command git describe --abbrev=0 --tags should return the version you are expecting. If you are trying to run CI scripts in a fork repository, make sure to push all the tags. You can also try to remove all the egg files or the complete egg folder, i.e., .eggs, as well as the *.egg-info folders in the src folder or potentially in the root of your project.

Maintainer tasks¶

Releases¶

If you are part of the group of maintainers and have correct user permissions on PyPI, the following steps can be used to release a new version for formparse:

Make sure all unit tests are successful.
Tag the current commit on the main branch with a release tag, e.g., v1.2.3.
Push the new tag to the upstream repository, e.g., git push upstream v1.2.3
Clean up the dist and build folders with rm -rf dist build to avoid confusion with old builds and Sphinx docs.
Run python -m build and check that the files in dist have the correct version (no .dirty or git hash) according to the git tag. Also check the sizes of the distributions, if they are too big (e.g., > 500KB), unwanted clutter may have been accidentally included.
Run twine check dist/* to check if there are any errors detected.
Upload it as a test to test-PyPI with twine upload -r testpypi dist/*
Run twine upload dist/* and check that everything was uploaded to PyPI correctly.