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Contribution guidelines

Who are we?

Administrators (Uri Granta, Sebastian Ober, Hrvoje Stojic) look after the GitHub repository itself.

Maintainers (Uri Granta, Henry Moss, Sebastian Ober, Victor Picheny, Hrvoje Stojic) steer the project, keep the community thriving, and manage contributions.

Contributors (you?) submit issues, make pull requests, answer questions on Slack, and more.

Community is important to us, and we want everyone to feel welcome and be able to contribute to their fullest. Our code of conduct gives an overview of what that means.

Reporting a bug

Finding and fixing bugs helps us provide robust functionality to all users. You can either submit a bug report or, if you know how to fix the bug yourself, you can submit a bug fix. We gladly welcome either, but a fix is likely to be released sooner, simply because others may not have time to quickly implement a fix themselves. If you're interested in implementing it, but would like help in doing so, ask in Trieste channels of Secondmind Labs' community Slack workspace.

We use GitHub issues for bug reports. You can use the issue template to start writing yours. Once you've submitted it, the maintainers will take a look as soon as possible, ideally within the week, and get back to you about how to proceed. If it's a small easy fix, they may implement it then and there. For fixes that are more involved, they will discuss with you about how urgent the fix is, with the aim of providing some timeline of when you can expect to see it.

If you'd like to submit a bug fix, the pull request templates are a good place to start. We recommend you discuss your changes with the community before you begin working on them, so that questions and suggestions can be made early on.

Requesting a feature

Trieste is built on features added and improved by the community. You can submit a feature request either as an issue or, if you can implement the change yourself, as a pull request. We gladly welcome either, but a pull request is likely to be released sooner, simply because others may not have time to quickly implement it themselves. If you're interested in implementing it, but would like help in doing so, ask in Trieste channels of Secondmind Labs' community Slack workspace.

We use GitHub issues for feature requests. You can use the issue template to start writing yours. Once you've submitted it, the maintainers will take a look as soon as possible, ideally within the week, and get back to you about how to proceed. If it's a small easy feature that is backwards compatible, they may implement it then and there. For features that are more involved, they will discuss with you about a timeline for implementing it. Features that are not backwards compatible are likely to take longer to reach a release. It may become apparent during discussions that a feature doesn't lie within the scope of Trieste, in which case we will discuss alternative options with you, such as adding it as a notebook or an external extension to Trieste.

If you'd like to submit a pull request, the pull request templates are a good place to start. We recommend you discuss your changes with the community before you begin working on them, so that questions and suggestions can be made early on.

Pull request guidelines

  • Limit the pull request to the smallest useful feature or enhancement, or the smallest change required to fix a bug. This makes it easier for reviewers to understand why each change was made, and makes reviews quicker.
  • Where appropriate, include documentation, type hints, and tests. See those sections for more details.
  • Pull requests that modify or extend the code should include appropriate tests, or be covered by already existing tests. In particular:
    • New features should include a demonstration of how to use the new API, and should include sufficient tests to give confidence that the feature works as expected.
    • Bug fixes should include tests to verify that the updated code works as expected and defend against future regressions.
    • When refactoring code, verify that existing tests are adequate.
  • So that notebook users have the option to import things as 
    import trieste
trieste.utils.objectives.branin(...)
    import all modules (or their contents) in their parent package __init__.py file.
  • In commit messages, be descriptive but to the point. Comments such as "further fixes" obscure the more useful information.

Documentation

Trieste has two primary sources of documentation: the notebooks and the API reference.

For the API reference, we document Python code inline, using reST markup. See here for details on the documentation build. All parts of the public API need docstrings (indeed anything without docstrings won't appear in the built documentation). Similarly, don't add docstrings to private functionality, else it will appear in the documentation website. Use code comments sparingly, as they incur a maintenance cost and tend to drift out of sync with the corresponding code.

Quality checks

We use tox to run reproducible quality checks. This guide assumes you have this installed.

Type checking

We use type hints for documentation and static type checking with mypy. We do this throughout the source code and tests. The notebooks are checked for type correctness, but we only add types there if they are required for mypy to pass. This is because we anticipate most readers of notebooks won't be using type hints themselves. If you don't know how to add type hints when making a pull request, ask for help from reviewers or on the community Slack workspace. You can use typing.Any where the actual type isn't expressible or practical, but do avoid it where possible.

Run the type checker with

$ tox -e types

Tests

We write and run tests with pytest. We aim for all public-facing functionality to have tests for both happy and unhappy paths (that test it works as intended when used as intended, and fails as intended otherwise). We don't test private functionality, as the cost to ease of development is more problematic than the benefit of improved robustness.

Run tests with

$ tox -e tests

To save time, some slower tests are not run by default. Run these with:

$ tox -e tests -- --runslow yes

Code formatting

We format all Python code, other than the notebooks, with black, flake8, and isort. You may need to run these before pushing changes, with (in the repository root)

$ black .
$ flake8 .
$ isort .

Virtual environments and taskipy

During development, it can sometimes be more convenient to set up a virtual environment to run the tests in rather than using tox. If you decide to do this, then we recommend installing taskipy by running:

pip install -r common_build/taskipy/requirements.txt -c common_build/taskipy/constraints.txt

You can then use task to run various common tasks:

  • task tests to run all the tests (including type checking, but excluding slow tests);
  • task quicktests to run just the unit tests (starting with the last failure and exiting immediately on any error);
  • task alltests to run all the tests including the slow tests;
  • task slowtests to run just the slow tests;
  • task mypy to run just the type checks;
  • task format to reformat the code using black, flake8 and isort;
  • task check_format to check whether the code is correctly formatted.

Continuous integration

GitHub actions will automatically run the quality checks against pull requests to the develop branch, by calling into tox. The GitHub repository is set up such that these need to pass in order to merge.

Updating dependencies

To update the Python dependencies used in any part of the project, update setup.py and/or any relevant requirements.txt files. Then, in the repository root, and with all virtual environments deactivated, run

$ ./generate_constraints.sh

This will update the constraints.txt files (but not your virtual environment).

License

Apache License 2.0