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Maintainers Guide

If you want to get involved in the project, you may want to read the Contributing Guide instead.

This guide documents our procedures and policies for project maintenance tasks, including managing our GitHub repository branches, pull requests, continuous integration, releasing, and instructing users on citation practices.

Contents

Onboarding

Current maintainers are responsible for onboarding new maintainers and getting them up to speed with our processes.

Here is a checklist of things to do when onboarding a new maintainer:

  • Add them to the appropariate GitHub team to grant admin access to the repository.
  • Add them to the setup.cfg and/or pyproject.toml file so that they show up on PyPI.
  • Make sure they have a PyPI and TestPyPI account with 2FA enabled.
  • Add them as package owners on PyPI.
  • Add them as maintainer in the corresponding conda-forge feedstock repository.
  • Have a meeting to talk about their new responsibilities (outlined in GOVERNANCE.md).
  • When a new package release is required, arrange a video call to walk them through the entire release process.

Branches

  • main: Always tested and ready to become a new version. Don't push directly to this branch. Make a new branch and submit a pull request instead.
  • gh-pages: Holds the HTML documentation and is served by Github. Pages for the master branch are in the dev folder. Pages for each release are in their own folders. Automatically updated by GitHub Actions so you shouldn't have to make commits here.

Reviewing and merging pull requests

A few guidelines for reviewing:

  • Always be polite and give constructive feedback.
  • Welcome new users and thank them for their time, even if we don't plan on merging the PR.
  • Don't be harsh with code style or performance. If the code is bad, either (1) merge the pull request and open a new one fixing the code and pinging the original submitter (2) comment on the PR detailing how the code could be improved. Both ways are focused on showing the contributor how to write good code, not shaming them.

Pull requests should be squash merged. This means that all commits will be collapsed into one. The main advantages of this are:

  • Eliminates experimental commits or commits to undo previous changes.
  • Makes sure every commit on master passes the tests and has a defined purpose.
  • The maintainer writes the final commit message, so we can make sure it's good and descriptive.

Continuous Integration

We use GitHub Actions continuous integration (CI) services to build and test the project on Windows, Linux, and Mac. The configuration files for this service are in .github/workflows.

The CI jobs include:

  • Running the test suite on multiple combinations of OS, Python version, with and without optional dependencies.
  • Running Black, flake8, and pylint to check the code for style.
  • Building the documentation to make sure it works.
  • Pushing the built documentation HTML to the gh-pages branch.
  • Upload source and wheel distributions to TestPyPI (on pushes to main) and PyPI (on releases).

This way, most day-to-day maintenance operations are automatic.

Making a Release

We try to automate the release process as much as possible. GitHub Actions handles publishing new releases to PyPI and updating the documentation. The version number is set automatically from the git tag using setuptools-scm. There are a few steps that still must be done manually, though.

To start a new release:

  1. Create an issue with the "Release checklist" template (source here).
  2. Follow the steps in the checklist.

You can also watch this recording of Leo walking through the process of releasing Verde v1.7.0 from March 2022: https://youtu.be/JNMcMuMYn8E

To complete the entire process, you'll need:

  1. "Write" permission (or greater) on the GitHub repository.
  2. Be a maintainer on the conda-forge recipe.
  3. Write access to the Zenodo entry for the package. We have a shared Fatiando account in Zenodo that should be used to upload new releases or create new packages.

Citations

The citation for a package that doesn't have an associated paper will be the Zenodo DOI for all versions. This citation will include everyone who has contributed to the project and met our authorship criteria.

Include the following text in the CITATION.rst file:

This is research software **made by scientists**. Citations help us justify the
effort that goes into building and maintaining this project.

If you used this software in your research, please consider
citing the following source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3530749

The link above includes full citation information and export formats (BibTeX,
Mendeley, etc).

If the project has been publish as an academic paper (for example, on JOSS), update the CITATION.rst to point to the paper instead of the Zenodo archive.

If you used this software in your research, please consider citing the
following publication:

    <full citation including authors, title, journal, DOI, etc>

This is an open-access publication. The paper and the associated reviews can be
freely accessed at: https://doi.org/<INSERT-DOI-HERE>

The link above includes full citation information and export formats (BibTeX,
Mendeley, etc).