Contribution Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing to icepyx! We welcome and invite contributions of any size from anyone at any career stage and with any amount of coding experience. Since this is a community-based project, we’re thankful for your contributions to the utility and success of this project.

Here we provide a set of guidelines and information for contributing to icepyx. This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Contributor Covenant

Ways to Contribute

  • Share your use cases and examples (as Jupyter Notebooks, scripts, etc.)

  • Submit bug reports and feature requests

  • Write code for everyone to use

  • Fix typos

  • Improve documentation and testing

The best way to report a problem, request a feature, find out if others are working on a similar problem or application, or let us know you’d like to contribute is to find the Issues tab and check if your problem/suggestion has already been reported. If so, please provide any additional information in the ongoing discussion. Otherwise, feel free to create a new issue and submit your problem or suggestions.

Requesting a Feature

Find the Issues tab at the top of GitHub repository and click the New Issue button. Please give your suggestion a clear title and let us know if this is something you’d like to work on and contribute.

Reporting a Bug

Find the Issues tab at the top of GitHub repository and click the New Issue button. Give your issue a clear title and describe the steps required to recreate it in as much detail as possible. If you can, include a small example that reproduces the error. More information and minimal examples will help us resolve issues faster.

Questions and Help

Please do not create issues to ask for help. A faster way to reach the community is through our Science/ICESat-2 subcategory on the Pangeo discourse page. We are excited to have you join an existing conversation or start a new post! Please note that a GitHub login is required to post on the discourse page.

Other Resources

Adding Examples

We are delighted you’d like to contribute your icepyx example! Examples may be in the form of executable scripts or interactive Jupyter Notebooks. Please make sure that each example has a descriptive name so someone not familiar with your project understands its general behavior. Fully working examples should be submitted using a pull request to the “development” branch, following the steps outlined below for Contributing Code.

Contributing Code

We follow a standard git workflow for code changes and additions. All submitted code, including our own, goes through the pull request process; no changes are pushed directly to the main or development branches. This allows our continuous integration (testing) process to ensure that the code is up to our standards and passes all of our tests (i.e. doesn’t break what’s already there and working). By having a development branch for daily work, we enable the main branch to remain stable between releases even as new features are being added.

First Steps

Before you begin writing code, please first check out our issues page. Someone may already be working on the same problem, and you may be able to contribute directly to their efforts. If not, create a new issue to describe what you plan to do.

General Guidelines

  • Make each pull request as small and simple as possible. Unrelated changes should be submitted as multiple pull requests.

  • Larger changes should be broken down into their basic components and integrated separately.

  • Bug fixes should be their own pull requests.

  • Do not commit changes to files irrelevant to your pull request, such as .gitignore

  • Write descriptive commit and pull request messages. Someone looking at the code a decade from now should know what you worked on from your commit message.

  • Be kind and encouraging to all contributors; be willing to accept constructive criticism to improve your code.

  • Review of pull requests takes time, particularly if the pull request is large and/or the commit messages are ambiguous.

Basic Steps to Contribute

We encourage users to follow the git pull request workflow. For more detailed steps, please see How to Contribute.

Licensing

icepyx is licensed under the BSD-3 license. Contributed code will also be licensed under BSD-3. If you did not write the code yourself, it is your responsibility to ensure that the existing license is compatible and included in the contributed files or you have documented permission from the original author to relicense the code.

Improving Documentation and Testing

Found a typo in the documentation or have a suggestion to make it clearer? Consider letting us know by creating an issue or (better yet!) submitting a fix. This is a great, low stakes way to practice the pull request process!

Discovered a currently untested case? Please share your test, either by creating an issue or submitting a pull request to add it to our suite of test cases.

Attribution for Contributions

We appreciate any and all contributions made to icepyx, direct or indirect, large or small. To learn more about how you will be recognized for your contributions, please see our Attribution Guidelines.