Contributing

Ways to contribute

Not all of these involve writing code:

• Questions. Asking when something is unclear points at documentation that needs work. pysmo is developed in the open, so ask on GitHub, as an issue or a discussion. Answering other people's questions helps just as much.
• Bug reports. Open an issue, or add to an existing one. A failing test that reproduces the bug is ideal.
• Code. A useful function, a new type, or a tool built on pysmo can all be contributed. Code standards covers what is expected.

What a contribution contains

Well-written code, tests that cover it, and docstrings on anything public. Because the documentation is generated from docstrings, a contribution is often just two files: the implementation and its test.

Submitting a pull request

Set up a checkout as described in Setting up, then work on a branch:

git checkout -b my-feature

Before opening the pull request:

• Run make format, then make lint and make tests. All three must pass.
• Rebase onto the current master and squash the branch into one well-described commit, so the history carries no "fix typo" steps. Commit messages follow conventional commits; the changelog is generated from them.

Opening the pull request triggers two automated checks:

• The test suite runs in clean environments on the supported Python versions. A pass locally but a failure here usually means a dependency is missing from pyproject.toml.
• The documentation is built. Follow the link on the pull request to check how it renders.

A maintainer then reviews the change.

Contributors

pysmo is built by its contributors. Early work on the project came from Omkar Ranadive, Helio Tejedor, Xiaoting Lou, and Lay Kuan Loh.