NiBabel Developer Guidelines

Also see Developer documentation page

NiBabel source code

Documentation

Code Documentation

Please write documentation using Numpy documentation conventions:

Git Repository

Layout

The main release branch is called master. This is a merge-only branch. Features finished or updated by some developer are merged from the corresponding branch into master. At a certain point the current state of master is tagged – a release is done.

Only usable feature should end-up in master. Ideally master should be releasable at all times.

Additionally, there are distribution branches. They are prefixed dist/ and labeled after the packaging target (e.g. debian for a Debian package). If necessary, there can be multiple branches for each distribution target.

dist/debian/proper

Official Debian packaging

dist/debian/dev

Debian packaging of unofficial development snapshots. They do not go into the main Debian archive, but might be distributed through other channels (e.g. NeuroDebian).

Releases are merged into the packaging branches, packaging is updated if necessary and the branch gets tagged when a package version is released. Maintenance (as well as backport) releases or branches off from the respective packaging tag.

There might be additional branches for each developer, prefixed with initials. Alternatively, several GitHub (or elsewhere) clones might be used.

Commits

Please prefix all commit summaries with one (or more) of the following labels. This should help others to easily classify the commits into meaningful categories:

  • BF : bug fix

  • RF : refactoring

  • NF : new feature

  • BW : addresses backward-compatibility

  • OPT : optimization

  • BK : breaks something and/or tests fail

  • PL : making pylint happier

  • DOC: for all kinds of documentation related commits

  • TEST: for adding or changing tests

Merges

For easy tracking of what changes were absorbed during merge, we advise that you enable merge summaries within git:

git-config merge.summary true

See Configure git for more detail.

Changelog

The changelog is located in the toplevel directory of the source tree in the Changelog file. The content of this file should be formatted as restructured text to make it easy to put it into manual appendix and on the website.

This changelog should neither replicate the VCS commit log nor the distribution packaging changelogs (e.g. debian/changelog). It should be focused on the user perspective and is intended to list rather macroscopic and/or important changes to the module, like feature additions or bugfixes in the algorithms with implications to the performance or validity of results.

It may list references to 3rd party bugtrackers, in case the reported bugs match the criteria listed above.

Community guidelines

Please see our community guidelines. Other projects call these guidelines the “code of conduct”.