Contributing

Welcome to symaware.base contributor’s guide.

This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.

If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp.

Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation’s Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports

If you experience bugs or general issues with symaware.base, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don’t see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation Improvements

You can help improve symaware.base docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

symaware.base documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.

Most of the documentation is written in reStructuredText and can be found in the docs folder. The main documentation page is docs/index.rst. Some markdown files are also in use.

Finally, to document the code, symaware.base uses docstrings in the Numpy style. They can be found in the source code files at the beginning of functions, classes and modules.

Tip

Please notice that the GitLab web interface provides a quick way of propose changes in symaware.base’s files. While this mechanism can be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs, and can be quite handy.

If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to the docs folder in the source repository, find which file you would like to propose changes and click in the edit button at the top right, to open GitLab’s code editor or GitLab’s IDE. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes have you made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal.

When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using tox:

tox -e docs

and use Python’s built-in web server for a preview in your web browser (http://localhost:8000):

python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'

Before submitting your changes, check for potential errors by running:

tox -e doctests,linkcheck

Code Contributions

symaware.base is a Python package. It can be installed with pip install symaware-base.

It is part of the larger symaware project, which is a collection of tools aimed at addressing the fundamental need for a new conceptual framework for awareness in multi-agent systems (MASs) that is compatible with the internal models and specifications of robotic agents and that enables safe simultaneous operation of collaborating autonomous agents and humans.

The SymAware framework will use compositional logic, symbolic computations, formal reasoning, and uncertainty quantification to characterise and support situational awareness of MAS in its various dimensions, sustaining awareness by learning in social contexts, quantifying risks based on limited knowledge, and formulating risk-aware negotiation of task distributions.

Directory structure

The source code of symaware.base is located in the src folder. The tests folder contains the package’s tests and the docs folder contains the documentation sources.

symaware-base
├── .pylintrc                # pylint configuration
├── docs
│   ├── _static              # Static files for the documentation
│   ├── conf.py              # Sphinx configuration
│   ├── index.rst            # Main page of the documentation
│   └── requirements.txt     # Documentation requirements
├── pyproject.toml           # Project configuration
├── README.md
│── src                      # Source code
│   └── testsymaware         # Namespace
│       └── base              # Package
│           ├── __init__.py  # Source code
│           └── ...
├── tests                    # Package tests
│   ├── conftest.py          # Optional pytest configuration
│   ├── unit                 # Unit tests
│   ├── integration          # Integration tests
│   └── e2e                  # End-to-end tests
└── tox.ini                  # tox configuration

Submit an issue

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it’s best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.

Create an environment

Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can easily be done via either pip-venv:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate # or .venv\Scripts\activate.bat on Windows

or virtualenv:

virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate # or .venv\Scripts\activate.bat on Windows

or Miniconda:

conda create -n symaware-base python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate symaware-base

Clone the repository

1. Create an user account on GitLab if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitLab.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

   git clone git@{{ cookiecutter.repository.split('/')[2] }}:<YOUR FORKED REPOSITORY>.git
   cd symaware-base
   

4. You should run:

   pip install -e .
   

   to be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL.

Implement your changes

1. Create a branch to hold your changes:

   git checkout -b my-feature
   

   and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!

2. Start your work on this branch. Don’t forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs. Also, try adding unit tests for your new code to make sure it works as expected and to avoid regressions in the future.

   If the changes only modify the source code, they will be limited to the src folder and the tests folder.

3. Add yourself to the list of contributors in pyproject.toml.

4. When you’re done editing, do:

   git add <MODIFIED FILES>
   git commit
   

   to record your changes in git.

Important

Don’t forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.

Moreover, writing a descriptive commit message is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:

git log --graph --oneline --abbrev-commit --all

to look for recurring communication patterns.

1. Please check that your changes don’t break any tests or linting rules with:

   tox
   

   (after having installed tox with pip install tox or pipx).

   You can also use tox to run several other pre-configured tasks in the repository. Try tox -av to see a list of the available checks.

   • If you want to run test or linting checks selectively, use:

     tox -e py-test
     tox -e py-lint
     

   • If some of the lint checks fail, it may be possible to automatically fix them with:

     tox -e fixlint
     

   • You can perform the same actions without tox by running:

     # Install additional development dependencies
     pip3 install .[lint,test]
     
     # Lint
     black --check src tests
     pylint src tests
     mypy src tests
     isort --check-only --diff src tests
     
     # Test
     pytest
     
     # Try to automatically fix lint problems
     black src tests
     isort src tests
     

Submit your contribution

1. If everything works fine, push your local branch to GitLab with:

   git push -u origin my-feature
   

2. Go to the web page of your fork and click “Create merge request” to send your changes for review.

Troubleshooting

The following tips can be used when facing problems to build or test the package:

1. Make sure to fetch all the tags from the upstream repository. The command git describe --abbrev=0 --tags should return the version you are expecting. If you are trying to run CI scripts in a fork repository, make sure to push all the tags. You can also try to remove all the egg files or the complete egg folder, i.e., .eggs, as well as the *.egg-info folders in the src folder or potentially in the root of your project.

2. Sometimes tox misses out when new dependencies are added, especially to setup.cfg and docs/requirements.txt. If you find any problems with missing dependencies when running a command with tox, try to recreate the tox environment using the -r flag. For example, instead of:

   tox -e docs
   

   Try running:

   tox -r -e docs
   

3. Make sure to have a reliable tox installation that uses the correct Python version (e.g., 3.9+). When in doubt you can run:

   tox --version
   # OR
   which tox
   

   If you have trouble and are seeing weird errors upon running tox, you can also try to create a dedicated virtual environment with a tox binary freshly installed. For example:

   virtualenv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate
   .venv/bin/pip install tox
   .venv/bin/tox -e all
   

4. Pytest can drop you in an interactive session in the case an error occurs. In order to do that you need to pass a --pdb option (for example by running tox -- -k <NAME OF THE FALLING TEST> --pdb). You can also setup breakpoints manually instead of using the --pdb option.

Maintainer tasks

Releases

If you are part of the group of maintainers and have correct user permissions on PyPI, the following steps can be used to release a new version for symaware.base:

1. Make sure all unit tests are successful.

2. Tag the current commit on the main branch with a release tag, e.g., v1.2.3.

3. Push the new tag to the upstream repository, e.g., git push upstream v1.2.3

4. Clean up the dist and build folders with tox -e clean (or rm -rf dist build) to avoid confusion with old builds and Sphinx docs.

5. Run tox -e build and check that the files in dist have the correct version (no .dirty or git hash) according to the git tag. Also check the sizes of the distributions, if they are too big (e.g., > 500KB), unwanted clutter may have been accidentally included.

6. Run tox -e publish -- --repository pypi and check that everything was uploaded to PyPI correctly.