How to contribute

Standards for core modules

In PySCF-2.0, features are split into core modules and extension projects. Extension projects are hosted at https://github.com/pyscf. The standards for features in the core modules are

  • Documentation. Core modules need to be documented. Documentation should include the user-guide, the API manual and a few runnable examples. The document repo is https://github.com/pyscf/pyscf-doc.

  • Unittests and test coverage. Unittests should be created for all APIs of the core modules.

  • Minimal compilation requirements. PySCF core modules are compiled and released in a general Python package. These modules need to be compatible with as many platforms and system environments as possible. If your code requires specific Python versions, specific compiler sets, or specific libraries (e.g. MPI), it is recommended to develop the features in the extension project.

How to make an extension

  1. Download the template (https://github.com/pyscf/extension-template), run the script in the extension template:

    $ curl -L https://github.com/pyscf/extension-template/archive/refs/tags/0.1.0.tar.gz | tar xvzf -
    $ mv extension-template new-project
    $ cd new-project
    $ make new-project
    
  2. Check whether files like README.md, setup.py, __init__.py are correctly updated.

  3. In the new project folder, initialize git repo:

    $ git init
    $ git add .
    $ git commit -m "An example of new extension package"
    
  4. If your program needs to compile C/C++ code, you can edit the setup.py to include your code files. For example:

    SO_EXTENSIONS = {
      'pyscf.new_feature.new_feature': ['pyscf/new_feature/new_feature.cc']
    }
    
  5. Release the extension project on https://github.com/pyscf.

How to release a new version

Since PySCF-2.0, a PR-review-release pipeline was created to release the program on pypi, conda and docker. Here are the steps to release a new version:

  1. Update the __version__ variable in the file pyscf/__init__.py

  2. In the file CHANGELOG, shortly summarize the new features, the bugfixes or other relevant changes

  3. Open a PR on https://github.com/pyscf/pyscf. When the PR is merged, the release pipeline will be automatically triggered. In the action page https://github.com/pyscf/pyscf/actions/workflows/publish.yml, check whether all jobs are correctly executed.