Contributing

Types of contributions

All types of contributions are welcome: bugfixes, adding unit/integration tests, etc. If you’re only have a little bit of time and/or are new to SIERRA, looking at the issues is a good place to look for places to contribute. If you have more time and/or want to give back to the community in a bigger way, see Development Roadmap for some big picture ideas about where things might be going, and help shape the future!

Mechanics

Writing the code

To contribute to the SIERRA core, in you should follow the general workflow and python development guide outlined in Python Development Guide and General Development Workflow. For the static analysis step:

  1. Install development packages for SIERRA (from the SIERRA repo root):

    pip3 install .[devel]

  2. Run nox to check most things prior to commiting/pushing your changes. If there are errors you have introduced, fix them. Some checkers (such as pylint), will still report errors, as cleaning up the code is always a work in progress:

    nox

  3. Run the following on any module directories you changed, from the root of SIERRA:

    mypy --ignore-missing-imports --warn-unreachable sierra

    Fix relevant errors your changes have introduced (there will probably still be errors in the my output, because cleaning up the code is always a work in progress), and mypy just gives a lot of false positives in general; this is also why it’s not part of what runs with nox.

SIERRA Source Code Directory Structure

It is helpful to know how SIERRA is layed out, so it is easier to see how things fit together, and where to look for implementation details if (really when) SIERRA crashes. So here is the directory structure, as seen from the root of the repository.

  • sierra - The SIERRA python package

    • core/ - The parts of SIERRA which independent of the Project being run.

      • experiment/ - Various interfaces and bindings for use by plugins.

      • generators/ - Generic controller and scenario generators used to modify template XML files to provide the setting/context for running experiments with variables.

      • graphs/ - Generic code to generate graphs of different types.

      • models/ - Model interfaces.

      • pipeline/ - Core pipline code in 5 stages (see SIERRA Pipeline).

      • ros1/ - Common ROS1 bindings.

      • variables/ - Generic generators for experimental variables to modify template XML files in order to run experiments with a given controller.

    • plugins/ - Plugins which provide broad customization of SIERRA, and enables it to adapt to a wide variety of platforms and experiment outputs.

  • docs/ - Contains sphinx source code to generate these shiny docs.