For Developers

Contributing

You want to contribute? Great!

This page contains the guidelines for contributing to vimiv and some helpful information to get you started. If any of the guidelines stop you from contributing, please do so anyway. They are only here to make my life easier, I will happily try to fix any problems myself.

If you run into any issues, feel free to contact me under karlch@protonmail.com.

Finding something to do

You probably already know what you want to work on as you are reading this page. If you want to implement a new feature, it might be a good idea to open a feature request on the issue tracker or send me an email first. Otherwise you might be dissapointed if I do not accept your pull request because I do not want this feature added.

A great way to help is to work on open issues.

As this is my first larger project, reviewing and improving the code itself is another possibility to contribute. Especially the testsuite probably needs improvement.

If you do not want to code anything, you can still contribute by:

• Improving the documentation
• Improving the keybinding cheatsheet
• Working on this website and on any graphics like the icon

Style and tests

Newly introduced code should not break any existing tests or modify them according to the new behaviour. If you introduce a new feature, writing a test for it would be awesome!

The tests can be run with

$ make test

This simply calls the script run_tests.sh which starts by cloning the images used for tests from the branch testimages. It starts Xvfb on display :42. The testsuite is then run with nosetests.

Similarly the stlye checkers are run with

$ make lint

which calls pylint, pydocstyle and pycodestyle for all .py files in the vimiv and tests directories. They are configured in .pylintrc, .pydocstylerc and .pycodestyle respectively.

As bonus

$ make spellcheck

runs spell checking for docstrings and comments using enchant. This does not work well when referencing variables, methods, … but has caught quite a few typos for me. If the only errors remaining are variable names etc., calling

$ make spellcheck_add_unknown

will add them to the whitelist.

Test requirements

Additionally to the standard requirements to get vimiv up and running, the following programs are necessary to run the testsuite and the style checkers.

For the tests

• nosetests
• xvfb
• python coverage

For the style checkers

• pylint
• pydocstyle
• pycodestyle
• optional: enchant with hunspell_en for spellchecking