Contribution Conventions

When committing to the repository, there are a few conventions that should be followed.

Code Style

  • Code is clean and commented where needed
  • Any unused code is either removed or commented out
  • Methods that are not entirely obvious as to how they work should have a doc comment explaining the purpose and arguments (see Storm.py for an example)
  • Code with different functions should be reasonably separated by directories of their function
  • When changing any functions, documentation referencing that code should be changed to match (.md files / doc comments)
  • If changes are made to another person's code that fundamentally change the output / input of the code, discuss those changes with the original creator

Handling Branches

Branch Purpose
Master Presentable, functional code
Beta Bug fixes & general addition
Others 1 New distinct features that are incomplete / not functional yet

Project & External Data

  • All large data files must be excluded from the GitHub repository. Note: All files except .gitignore files are ignored in the data folder, so storing data in a sub-directory there is a good option! To force Git to commit a directory, but not the files in it, you can copy the .gitignore from data/archive_cache into the directory.

  1. Other Branches

    Create new branches with beta as the base, as needed, making sure to name them appropriately to the feature you are trying to make. Make sure that you occasionally pull new commits from beta to minimize merging conflicts if / when the feature is pulled into beta!

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