CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Nektar++

Contents

This is a reasonably complete guide to help if you're interested in contributing to Nektar++, either in reporting bugs or, hopefully, trying to fix them! It's split up into a number of sections:

• Issues and bug reports
• How to contribute
• Submission checklist
• Git cheatsheet
• Testing and Buildbot
• Documentation
• Formatting guidelines

Issues and bug reports

Think you've found a bug or issue with Nektar++? We're very keen to hear about it!

• In the first instance, you should raise an issue on the issue tracker -- be sure to do a quick search and see if anyone has reported the same thing first.
• Alternatively you can join the mailing list for more advice.

It's really helpful if you can include a small session file that reproduces the error, and can give a good description of the problem you're having.

How to contribute

If you've got a patch or feature, please consider contributing it back to the project. It's a pretty simple process:

1. Fork the Nektar++ repository in nektar/nektar into your username's space.
2. Create a branch with the naming convention:
   • feature/myawesomebranch: a new feature that wasn't in Nektar++ already.
   • fix/mygreatfix: fixes an issue that isn't tracked in the issue tracker.
   • ticket/123-myfantasticpatch: fixes an issue that is tracked in the issue tracker (please include the issue number somewhere!)
   • tidy/mybrillianttidying: cosmetic fixes to bring existing files up to the Nektar++ code guidelines.
3. Make sure you've gone through the checklist below.
4. Submit a merge request to merge into master. If you just want to see the diff and are not quite ready to merge, use the [WIP] tag in the title to prevent your code from being accidentally merged.
5. Put a comment in the MR saying that it's ready to be merged.
6. Respond to any comments in the code review.

Submission checklist

• Did you add regression tests (for fixes) or unit tests and/or normal tests for new features?
• Have you run your branch through buildbot and do all the tests pass?
• Is there documentation in the user guide and/or developer guide?
• Have you added a CHANGELOG entry, including the MR number?
• Are there any massive files you might have added in the commit history? We try to keep test files as small as possible. If so you'll need to rebase or filter-branch to remove those from the commit history.
• Is the code formatted correctly?
  • Note: unfortunately, Nektar++ has pretty inconsistent code formatting at the moment. To help in reviewing your submission, new files should be formatted according to the guidelines (or use clang-format as described below) -- otherwise, try to keep formatting consistent with the file you're working on.

Git cheatsheet

Although Gitlab gives a nice interface to view the diff between a branch and master, for large merges, it can be slow. The following git aliases can provide a quicker alternative. You can use these by inserting them into the .gitconfig file in your home directory, or inside the nektar++/.git/config file.

[alias]
branch-name = "!git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD"
diff-nows = diff --color -w
log-branch = log --pretty='%C(green)%h %C(red)%an %C(reset)(%C(blue)%ad%C(reset))%n%s' master..
diff-branch = diff -U5 --minimal --color -w master...

This gives you four commands:

• git branch-name displays the current branch name
• git diff-nows shows a diff of your current commit in colour, without whitespace changes.
• git log-branch shows a minimised log of all the commits on the current branch that are not in master.
• git diff-branch shows a diff of the current branch against master, without showing changes from master that aren't present in the branch (i.e. git diff master...branch), without whitespace changes. (This should be roughly equivalent to Gitlab's diff).

If you prefer a graphical interface to see the files that have changed in your commit, you can additionally use the git gui command to bring up a simple interface. git difftool can also be used in combination with a GUI diff viewer, to graphically view the output of git diff.

Testing and Buildbot

Your new features or fixes should include tests that cover the code you've added. There are numerous examples within the various Tests directory lying within the source trees, and there is an example of writing .tst files for our Tester executable in the tests/Examples directory. Once you've written your tests, add them to the CMakeLists.txt file for the relevant solver, or to the appropriate demos directory for library features in whatever directory you are working in.

You should also test your branch on the Nektar++ buildbot, which will compile and test the code against a number of Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems, both 32- and 64-bit. If your tests don't pass, we can't merge the code into master.

Testing is presently manually executed. You should:

1. Go to the buildbot site and navigate to the Builders page.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page in the section Force all builds
3. Enter your details. If you're working on a fork, then the Suffix to repo url box should be changed to username/nektar.
4. Hit the Force build button.
5. Check the output in the Grid page -- hopefully everything should be green! Tests can take up to two hours to run.

Documentation

Nektar++ has a fairly comprehensive user guide and a developer guide that is presently very incomplete. The following are rough guidelines for what you should provide:

• If you are writing user-exposed features, you should add some documentation to the user guide on how to use them.
• Any functions/classes should include Doxygen documentation.
• Generally, code should be well-commented using regular C++ comments to explain its function to help in reviewing it.

Nektar++ also has a growing number of tutorials to help introduce users and developers to the use of the library and the range of application solvers. These are stored in a separate repository, but are available from the main repository through a git submodule. To populate the docs/tutorial directory run git submodule init followed by git submodule update --remote. The latter command will ensure you have the latest master branch of the tutorials within your source tree.

Code review and merging

All merge requests will be reviewed by one of the senior developers. We try to stick to the following process:

• Senior developer will be assigned, MR will be assigned a milestone to target a release.
  • If the branch is deemed to be minor and passes the checklist above, senior developer will handle the request by themselves.
  • Otherwise, senior developer will ask one or more other developers to review the code.
• Submission checklist will be checked by the reviewers.
• Where appropriate, reviewers will comment on regions of code that need further development and/or improvement.
• In addition to any coding comments/suggestions, reviewers are asked to check the branch passes the regression tests and appropriate documentation has been added.
• Once feedback received from the branch author (if necessary) and reviewers are happy, the branch will be merged.

Formatting guidelines

Nektar++ uses C++, a language notorious for being easy to make obtuse and difficult to follow code. To hopefully alleviate this problem, there are a number of fairly simple formatting guidelines you should follow. We are reasonably relaxed about code formatting, but if you can follow the guidelines below this would be fantastic.

Basic rules

• All code should be wrapped to 80 characters.

• Indentation should be 4 spaces with no tabs. Namespaces should not be indented to give more room in the 80 character width.

• Please comment your code with Doxygen and inline comments wherever possible -- but don't use trailing inline comments to save the 80 character limit!

• All code blocks (even one-line blocks) should use braces, and braces should be on new lines; for instance

  if (someCondition)
  {
      myAwesomeFunction();
  }

• Don't use preprocessor directives and macros unless there is no viable alternative.

• However, please make sure you do have a header guard inside your .h files, which you should be sure to include in any headers you contribute.

• Use one .cpp and .h file per C++ class, and try to keep inline header code to a minimum (unless performance is a major factor).

• Put spaces around binary operators and constants.

• Put spaces after if, while, etc., but not after function names (see the example above).

Variables and naming

• Please use sensible names and use camelCase as a broad naming convention.
  • Variables should start with a lowercase letter, e.g. myAwesomeVariable.
  • Function, class, struct and typedef names should begin with capital letters, e.g. MyAwesomeFunction.
• Inside classes, member variables should be prefixed with m_, e.g. m_myAwesomeVariable.
  • Global constants used throughout the library should be prefixed with k (e.g. kGeometricTolerance), and enumerations should be prefixed with e (e.g. eGeometry).
• Use all uppercase letters with underscores between words for pre-processor definitions and macros.

Using clang-format

Code formatting is reasonably boring, so Nektar++ comes with a .clang-format file to allow for automatic code formatting. As noted above, you can use this for new files, or cosmetic tidy/* branches, but try to stick to existing formatting elsewhere.

Installing it is straightforward on most package managers. Nektar++ relies on options that are used in version 3.7 or later.

There are a number of instructions on how to use clang-format inside a number of text editors on the CLang website. However at a minimum, you should consider downloading the git-clang-format script into one of your $PATH locations. You can then run the command

git clang-format

before you do a git commit, and clang-format will automatically format your diff according to the guidelines.