CONTRIBUTING.md

The basics

Your help is appreciated and welcome!

The master branch is meant to hold the release code. At any time is should be identical to the code available on PyPI.

PR's will be pushed on the development branch if the actual package code is changed. When the time comes this branch will be merged to the master branch and a new release will be issued.

PR's that deal with documentation, and other addiacent files (README for example) can be pushed to the master branch.

When submitting PR's please take into account:

• the project's gloals
• PEP8 and the style guide bellow

Testing

Travis CI is enabled for this project. It is really helpfull for quality assurance and Python 2 and 3 compatibility check. It is advside to run the tests on both Python 3 and 2 before pushing the PR (Python 3.6 64 bit and Python 2.7 32 bit would be a very good combination to test).

Style guide

Please follow the following style guide in your new code:

• use numpy style docstrings (see example)

• chained function calls

  name = new_ch['short_name'].decode('latin-1').strip(' \r\n\t\0')
  
  # can be written as
  
  name = (
      new_ch['short_name']
      .decode('latin-1')
      .strip(' \r\n\t\0')
  )

• sets, dicts, tuples or lists (use trailing comma for last element)

  __all__ = [
      'Channel',
      'ChannelConversion',
      'ChannelDependency',
      'ChannelExtension',
      'ChannelGroup',
      'DataBlock',
      'DataGroup',
      'FileIdentificationBlock',
      'HeaderBlock',
      'ProgramBlock',
      'SampleReduction',
      'TextBlock',
      'TriggerBlock',
  ]
  
  INT_TYPES = {
      DATA_TYPE_UNSIGNED,
      DATA_TYPE_SIGNED,
      DATA_TYPE_UNSIGNED_INTEL,
      DATA_TYPE_UNSIGNED_MOTOROLA,
      DATA_TYPE_SIGNED_INTEL,
      DATA_TYPE_SIGNED_MOTOROLA,
  }
  
  mydict = {
      'key1': val1,
      'key2': val2,
      'key3': val3,
  }

• long strings

  message = (
      'Multiple occurances for channel "{}". '
      'Using first occurance from data group {}. '
      'Provide both "group" and "index" arguments'
      ' to select another data group'
  )

• list comprehension

  compacted_signals = [
      {'signal': sig}
      for sig in simple_signals
      if sig.samples.dtype.kind in 'ui'
  ]

• prefer "()" over line continuation "\"