pyMOR is an open project and we welcome any contributions which improve or extend pyMOR. The purpose of this document is to make the contribution process easier for you and to answer some questions which might arise.
When you have written some code you want to contribute to pyMOR, the first thing you should do is to ensure that your code is contained in one or several git commits which have commit messages appropriately describing their content.
All new code and all code changes enter pyMOR by way of a pull request from a branch on GitHub. Therefore the recommended way to send us your code is to create a fork of pyMOR on GitHub (if you do not have one already) and push your commits into a branch containing the code and create a pull request for it.
Once we have received your code, it will be reviewed and discussed with you by pyMOR's main developers. If it is found suitable for inclusion into pyMOR, your code will be merged into pyMOR's main repository. We may also make suggestions how to modify or improve your code to make it better fit into the project.
Of course, were are happy to help you prepare contributions to pyMOR. Feel free to ask for help at any time.
By submitting contributions to pyMOR, you give us the right to publish your code under pyMOR's license. In order to do so, you need to have the copyright for your code. If you do not hold the copyright, you have to ask the copyright holder for permission to contribute the code to pyMOR.
pyMOR's license (2-clause BSD) is a permissive open source license without copyleft. In particular, be aware that this license allows commercial use of your code when the license including the preceding copyright notice is reproduced. On the other hand, this will also enable you to create a commercial project based on pyMOR (including the parts of pyMOR written by others).
Please note that the copyright over your code is fully retained by you and not transferred in any way to the pyMOR project. However, you should be aware that there is no turning back: once your code is published under the BSD license, there is no way of revoking this license. Of course, you are free to not publish future versions of your code under the same license.
When you have contributed code to pyMOR you and the content of your contribution will be mentioned in the project's AUTHORS.md file. Contributions are grouped by release, so if you have contributed code to multiple releases, you will be mentioned for each of these releases. Moreover, you may add attribution notices (e.g. author name, corresponding publications, funding institutions) to the code you contribute.
If, for some reason, you do not wish to be mentioned in the AUTHORS.md file, please give us a short note. Also note that we cannot give attributions to trivial changes, such as fixing a typo in the documentation or correcting a very simple bug. However, your changes including your authorship will always be included in the git history of the project.
pyMOR follows the coding style of PEP8 apart from a few exceptions. Configurations for the PEP8 and flake8 code checkers are contained in setup.cfg.
As an additional rule when calling functions, positional arguments should genereally be passed as positional arguments whereas keyword arguments should be passed as keyword arguments. This will make your code less likely to break, when the called function is extended.
All functions and classes called or instantiated by users should be sufficiently well documented.
pyMOR's main developers form a small group of developers which, apart from making contributions to pyMOR, have the job of guiding and maintaining the future development of pyMOR. They are the only persons with direct push acces to pyMOR's main repository and have administrative priviliges over the pyMOR organization on GitHub.
As pyMOR is an open project, everyone is invited to step up to become a main developer. The current main developers will decide by simple majority vote if a candidate should be included into the group. In order to be accepted, an applicant should have made major contributions to pyMOR, both in form of code and by taking part in discussions on the mailing list and through GitHub. The applicant should be able to commit to the project for a time period of at least one year.
Main developers will be automatically retired (losing all priviliges) if they have not shown any relevant activity over a period of one year. Under special circumstances, the main developers (excluding the developer in question) may decide by simple majority vote to keep the developer in the group of main developers.