Contributing

Branching and Tagging Model

We use the git-flow workflow to that extend, that branch names(paces) have a certain meaing:

master
tip of the master branch is always the latest stable release
development
tip of the development branch is the current state of development and not expected to be stable or even usable
feature/*
various feature branches are used to implement new features and should be based off the development branch
release/*
a release branch is created from the development branch and used to prepare a new release and will be merged into master
hotfix/*
hotfix branches are based off master or development to fix important and severe bugs and should be merged into development and master as soon as possible

Releases and release candidates are tagged in the form release-X.Y.Z(-RCa), where X, Y, and Z specify the version with respect to semantic versioning and a the number of the release candidate of that version.

Commit Messages

To ease browsing the proejct’s history, we try to keep our commit messages clean and descriptive. Please try to follow the following rules as best as possible:

  • Commit Title must not be longer than 50 characters

    If applicable, the title should start with a category name (such as ‘docu‘, ‘tests‘, ‘solvers‘, ...) followed by a colon (e.g. “docu: add usage examples for SDC solver”).

  • Commit Description must have line wraps at 72 characters

  • Please sign your commits (i.e. use git commit -s)

    This automatically appends a line of the form “Signed-off-by: Torbjörn Klatt <t.klatt@fz-juelich.de>” to the end of the commit message.

How to Implement a New Feature?

  1. create a fork/clone
  2. switch to the development branch and pull in the latest changes
  3. create a new branch feature/XYZ where XYZ is a short title of your planned feature (word seperation should be done with underscores, e.g. feature/my_awesome_feature)
  4. hack and write Unit Tests
  5. commit
  6. repeat steps 4 and 5 until you feel your feature is in an almost usable state and most of the unit tests pass
  7. write documentation for your feature
  8. push your feature branch
  9. stay tuned on reviews, remarks and suggestions by the other developers