Developing Open Source Software Packages
This section covers best practises of contributing to existing software packages and of creating new packages.
HowTo collaborate
Collaboration is a wide field, not only code contribution.
GitHub Discussions
Issues
Pull Request/Merge Request
Not only code but also documentation can be added or extended. Even correcting typos is useful and appreciated by most package maintainers. Sometimes issues are labeled (eg
easy first issue) for easy identification.Mailing Lists
Discourse
The main documentation of the projects are a good place to get information about collaboration. For the projects involved here, those documentation locations can be found here:
https://openradarscience.org/projects/
Important
It’s good practice to adhere to the project’s Code of Conduct. But in any case - be friendly and welcoming.
HowTo create an own package
Important
Advise: use a cookiecutter! A cookiecutter is a command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates), e.g. creating a Python package project from a Python package project template.
We use the Python cookiecutter-template from https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage.git but without all bells and whistles.
Let’s just create a package with some function, install and test it.