Thank you for your willingness to contribute to 4C. We welcome all types of contributions, irrespective of size and complexity.
All contributions to 4C must adhere to The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity – Revised Edition 2023.
Issues are generally used to remind or inform yourself or others about certain things in the software. We use them to report bugs, start a feature request, or plan tasks. Please refer to GitHub Discussions to ask questions.
To create an issue, select one of our templates and provide a detailed description.
Before opening a new issue, please check whether your bug has already been reported within the existing issues. Opening an issue is a valid contribution on its own and does not mean you have to solve it yourself.
Set up 4C as described in the README.md
To ensure a high quality of the repository, we enforce some pre-commit hooks in the repository. You can activate them by executing the following command in your source directory:
./utilities/set_up_dev_env.sh
Add your changes to the codebase. Please add unit tests or input-file tests that capture your changes. For further information, see our documentation on testing.
Your changes are checked for a number of coding style conventions when creating a commit. These conventions are also verified when you submit a pull request. Please annotate your C++ source code with Doxygen comments.
Please provide meaningful commit messages.
Once you submitted your pull request, checks will run automatically to verify that you changes do not break existing functionality. We will review your changes before it can be merged into the main branch.
We desire a clean commit history. This may require rebasing the commits before merging.
In 4C, we have two types of documentation. The general 4C documentation generated with Sphinx and the 4C source code documentation generated with Doxygen. We welcome any improvements to our documentation. More information can be found here.