Contributing

eXSpy is meant to be a community maintained project. We welcome contributions in the form of bug reports, documentation, code, feature requests, and more. In the following we refer to some resources to help you make useful contributions.

Issues

The issue tracker can be used to report bugs or propose new features. When reporting a bug, the following is useful:

• give a minimal example demonstrating the bug,

• copy and paste the error traceback.

Pull Requests

If you want to contribute to the eXSpy source code, you can send us a pull request. Small bug fixes or corrections to the user guide are typically a good starting point. But don’t hesitate also for significant code contributions - if needed, we’ll help you to get the code ready to common standards.

Please refer to the HyperSpy developer guide in order to get started and for detailed contributing guidelines.

The kikuchipy contributors guide, another HyperSpy extension, also is a valuable resource that can get you started and provides useful guidelines.

Reviewing

As quality assurance, to improve the code, and to ensure a generalized functionality, pull requests need to be thoroughly reviewed by at least one other member of the development team before being merged.

Documentation

The eXSpy documentation consists of three elements:

• Docstrings following the numpy standard that document the functionality of individual methods on GitHub.

• The documentation written using Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs. The source is part of the GitHub repository.

• Jupyter notebooks in the eXSpy demos repository on GitHub that provide tutorials and example workflows.

Improving documentation is always welcome and a good way of starting out to learn the GitHub functionality. You can contribute through pull requests to the respective repositories.

Code style

eXSpy follows Style Guide for Python Code with The Black Code style.

For docstrings, we follow the numpydoc standard.

Package imports should be structured into three blocks with blank lines between them:

• standard libraries (like os and typing),

• third party packages (like numpy and hyperspy),

• and finally exspy imports.

Writing tests

All functionality in eXSpy is tested via the pytest framework. The tests reside in the test directory. Tests are short methods that call functions in eXSpy and compare resulting output values with known answers. Please refer to the HyperSpy development guide for further information on tests.

Releasing a new version

eXSpy versioning follows semantic versioning and the version number is therefore a three-part number: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Each number will change depending on the type of changes according to the following:

• MAJOR increases when making incompatible API changes,

• MINOR increases when adding functionality in a backwards compatible manner, and

• PATCH increases when making backwards compatible bug fixes.

The process to release a new version that is pushed to PyPI and Conda-Forge is documented in the Releasing guide.