Contributing

For all proposed changes (bug fixes, new features, documentation updates, etc.) please file an issue detailing what your ask is or what you intend to do.

The NSF NCAR software developers will work with you on that issue to help recommend implementations, work through questions, or provide other background knowledge.

Testing

Any code that you contribute must include associated unit tests. Our tests run across various platforms and with different configurations automatically. By including tests that exercise your code, you help to minimize the amount of time debugging platform-portability issues. New features must also include at least an example in our documentation.

Style guide

We (mostly) follow the Google C++ style guide. Please attempt to do the same to minimize comments on PRs. We are not dogmatic, however, and reasonable exceptions are allowed, especially where they help to simplify code or API interfaces.

We run clang-format over the codebase, so don’t worry too much about formatting your code by hand. The use of clang-format enforces a consistency that means moving from file to file shouldn’t have a large cognitive load on the developer.

Building the documentation

All of our docs are stored in the docs directory. There are several Python dependencies that need to be installed. To make this easy, we provide a requirements.txt file that you can use.

$ python -m venv miem_env
$ source miem_env/bin/activate
$ cd docs
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cd .. && mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake -D MIEM_BUILD_DOCS=ON ..
$ make docs
$ open docs/sphinx/index.html