Contributing

Chemfiles is an open-source project, that I make on my free time. Any contribution, from documentation improvement to new features including bug fixes are very welcome!

I would like to help, what can I do ?

Lot of things! Just pick one considering the time you can spend, and your technical skills. And do not hesitate to come by out gitter chat room to say hello and ask any question you can have!

Improving the code

You can pick any issue in the list. Help wanted issues are specially directed at first time contributors, and comes with step by step explanation of how to solve the issue.

If you plan to add a new feature which is not in the issue list, please open a new issue so that every one knows you are working on it, and so that the implementation strategy can be discussed!

Improve documentation

This documentation try to be easy to use, but there is always room for improvements. You can easily edit any .rst file on the github repository, and propose your changes even with no git knowledge. All you need is a Github account.

Share and spread the word

If you think that chemfiles is awesome, share it! The more users it will have, the more features we can add to it, together!

External project used

A few external projects are used in chemfiles developement, and you will need a bit of knowledge of them to contribute. Depending on what you want to do, not all these projects are needed.

  • Source code versionning: git, together with github web interface for issues and pull requests.

  • documentation: sphinx for generating HTML and PDF documentation, Doxygen for documenting the source code, and breathe to use Doxygen content in sphinx.

  • Build system: cmake is used as a cross-plateform, cross-build system generator.

  • Automatic testing: Catch2 provide an nice unit test framework, and travis run these tests each time the code is pushed to the repository.

Coding style, and other formating issues

When writing code for chemfiles, please respect the overall coding style. This is not only a question of style, but make it easier to enter in the project if all the files are formatted consistently. Do not use non standard features of any programming language unless there is no other way to do it. In that case, please wrap the code in #ifdef macros, and add cases for at least Linux, macOS and Windows. You should add unit tests for each new piece of code, they will be run on travis before your changes are merged.

Git messages should be informatives, and describe the what, not the how. If your commit concern the documentation, please add the [doc] at the beggining of the message.

Happy coding!