Guidelines for Contributing Code to Landlab

Please review the development practices.

Contributions that change high level Landlab organization should update this page in the documentation.

Publication of Landlab Contributions

A number of researchers have used the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) and Geoscientific Model Development as a journal outlet to publish their contribution to Landlab. There are a few aspects of the submission workflow for JOSS that are non-standard and are described below.

In addition, the JOSS editorial board and the Landlab core development team are presently (Jan 2019) working on defining some guidelines regarding what contributions to Landlab fit the scope of a JOSS submission. These will be summarized here when finalized. If you have any questions regarding whether your potential JOSS submission is appropriate, the best thing to do is to make a pre-submission inquiry with JOSS.

News Entries

The CHANGES.rst file is managed using towncrier and all non trivial changes must be accompanied by a news entry.

To add an entry to the news file, first you need to have created an issue describing the change you want to make. A Pull Request itself may function as such, but it is preferred to have a dedicated issue (for example, in case the PR ends up rejected due to code quality reasons).

Once you have an issue or pull request, you take the number and you create a file inside of the news/ directory, named after that issue number with a “type” of component, notebook, feature, bugfix, docs, or misc associated with it.

If your issue or PR number is 1234 and this change is fixing a bug, then you would create a file news/1234.bugfix.rst. PRs can span multiple categories by creating multiple files (for instance, if you added a new component and an associated notebook that demonstrates how to use it, you would create news/NNNN.component.rst and news/NNNN.notebook.rst).

If a PR touches multiple issues/PRs, you may create a file for each of them with the exact same contents and Towncrier will deduplicate them.