Contributing

BDSIM is open source software and the group highly encourages people to get in contact, contribute and add to the code. We are more than happy to provide guidance, get feedback and collaborate together.

Users may either get in touch and get write access to the repository after discussion with the developers or fork the repository and make “pull requests” through git.

Git Convention

Principles

• No one should commit to the master branch (the only exception is the release manager).

• The master branch is the default people will get when cloning the repository and should only be a working tagged version. Therefore, the only commits in master are tagged versions. This is so that anyone getting the software will have a sane tested version that definitely works.

• develop is our main development branch and features are made off of this branch.

• develop should always compile and run - i.e. feature branches should be tested as best as possible before merging back into develop. It is tolerable for develop to break unintentionally.

• We generally follow https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/.

• A new feature should have at least 1 (passing) test to demonstrate and exploit it.

• Documentation should be added to the manual before merging the branch.

Naming

• Feature branches should be descriptive and preferably named in the format “some-new-feature”.