Skip to content

Contributing

👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍

Where to start?

If you are looking for a good issue to start with, please check the following:

  • good first issue - issues that should be pretty simple to implement,
  • help wanted - issues that typically are a bit more involved than beginner issues,
  • high priority - things to fix ASAP but often of higher complexity.

Gitpod

The easiest way to start coding is to jump straight into Gitpod environment. You can either click the button below

Open in Gitpod

or prefix any mp-units URL (main branch, other branches, issues, PRs, ...) in your web browser with gitpod.io/# (e.g., https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/mpusz/mp-units).

The above environment provides you with:

  • all supported compilers for Linux development and the latest version of build tools like cmake and conan,
  • all Conan dependencies preinstalled on the machine,
  • all documentation generation tools ready to use,
  • completed prebuilds for all targets (Debug and Release builds for each compiler),
  • VSCode preconfigured to benefit from all the above.

Building, testing, and packaging

Alternatively, please refer to our official docs for download, build, and install instructions with the below changes if you want to set up a development environment on your local machine.

Conan configuration properties

user.mp-units.build:all

Enables compilation of all the source code, including tests and examples. To support this, it requires some additional Conan build dependencies described in Repository directory tree and dependencies. It also runs unit tests during the Conan build (unless tools.build:skip_test configuration property is set to True).

user.mp-units.build:skip_la

If user.mp-units.build:all is enabled, among others, Conan installs the external wg21-linear_algebra dependency and enables the compilation of linear algebra-based tests and usage examples. Such behavior can be disabled with this option.

user.mp-units.analyze:clang-tidy

Enables clang-tidy analysis.

CMake options for mp-units project developers

MP_UNITS_DEV_BUILD_LA

2.2.0 · ON/OFF (Default: ON)

Enables building code depending on the linear algebra library.

MP_UNITS_DEV_IWYU

2.2.0 · ON/OFF (Default: OFF)

Enables include-what-you-use analysis.

MP_UNITS_DEV_CLANG_TIDY

2.2.0 · ON/OFF (Default: OFF)

Enables clang-tidy analysis.

Building the entire repository

To build all the mp-units source code (with unit tests and examples), you should:

  1. Use the CMakeLists.txt from the top-level directory.
  2. Run Conan with user.mp-units.build:all = True.
git clone https://github.com/mpusz/mp-units.git && cd units
conan build . -pr <your_conan_profile> -s compiler.cppstd=23 -c user.mp-units.build:all=True -b missing

The above will download and install all of the dependencies needed for the development of the library, build all of the source code, and run unit tests.

If you prefer to build the project via CMake rather than Conan, then you should replace the conan build with conan install command and then follow with a regular CMake build and testing:

conan install . -pr <your_conan_profile> -s compiler.cppstd=23 -c user.mp-units.build:all=True -b missing
cmake --preset conan-default
cmake --build --preset conan-release
cmake --build --preset conan-release --target all_verify_interface_header_sets
cmake --build --preset conan-release --target test

Hint

To ensure that we always build all the targets and to save some typing of the Conan commands, we can set the following in the ~/.conan2/global.conf:

user.mp-units.build:all=True

Packaging

To test CMake installation and Conan packaging run:

conan create . --user <username> --channel <channel> -pr <your_conan_profile> -s compiler.cppstd=23 \
               -c user.mp-units.build:all=True -b missing

The above will create a Conan package and run tests provided in ./test_package directory.

In case you would like to upload mp-units package to the Conan server, do the following:

conan upload -r <remote-name> --all mp-units/2.2.0@<user>/<channel>

Building documentation

We are building our documentation using Material for MkDocs. The easiest way to install all the required dependencies is with pip:

pip install -U mkdocs-material mkdocs-rss-plugin

Additionally, a Cairo Graphics library is required by Material for MkDocs. Please follow the official MkDocs documentation to install it.

After that, you can either:

mkdocs serve

mkdocs build

Generating API reference

We need to take a few steps to set up our environment so that we are ready to generate API reference documents.

First, we need to satisfy the requirements described in https://github.com/cplusplus/draft and https://github.com/Eelis/cxxdraft-htmlgen. On the Ubuntu platform, this is equivalent to the following instructions run from the user's home directory:

sudo apt install latexmk texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-recommended lmodern
sudo apt install haskell-stack graphviz nodejs npm ghc cabal-install
npm install split mathjax-full mathjax-node-sre mathjax-node-cli
cabal update

On some platforms, installing mathjax-node-cli through npm does update the system's PATH environment variable resulting in tex2html not found errors. In such cases we need to add the .bin folder to the PATH environment variable manually:

echo "export PATH=\"~/node_modules/.bin:\$PATH\"" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

Next, we need to clone the following git repositories:

For example:

git clone https://github.com/JohelEGP/jegp.cmake_modules.git --depth=1
git clone https://github.com/JohelEGP/draft.git --branch=standardese_sources_base --depth=1
git clone https://github.com/JohelEGP/cxxdraft-htmlgen.git --branch=standardese_sources_base --depth=1

Now, we are ready to start building our API reference. First, we need to configure CMake with the following:

cmake -S docs/api_reference/src -B build/docs/api_reference \
      -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH="<path to gh:JohelEGP/jegp.cmake_modules>/modules" \
      -DJEGP_STANDARDESE_SOURCES_GIT_REPOSITORY="<path to gh:JohelEGP/draft>" \
      -DJEGP_CXXDRAFT_HTMLGEN_GIT_REPOSITORY="<path to gh:JohelEGP/cxxdraft-htmlgen>"

Then we need to build the docs with CMake:

cmake --build build/docs/api_reference

In the end, we need to move the generated documentation to the docs/api_reference/gen subdirectory:

mv build/docs/api_reference/mp-units.html docs/api_reference/gen

or just link the entire directory:

ln -sf ../../build/docs/api_reference/mp-units.html docs/api_reference/gen

Before committing git changes

There are a few steps recommended to check before committing and pushing your changes to the git repository.

Naming conventions

Here are the main rules for naming things in this repo:

  • types, functions, variables use standard_case,
  • template parameters use PascalCase,
  • C++ concept names, for now, use PascalCase, but we plan to change it (see GitHub Issue #93 for more details).

Unified code formatting

A formatting standard is enforced with the pre-commit script. Before committing your changes, please do the following:

pip install -U pre-commit
pre-commit run --all-files

This will run:

  • clang-format for code formatting with the .clang-format file provided in the repo,
  • cmake-format to format the CMake files,
  • some other checks (e.g., python script checkers, whitespaces, etc.).

The script will run on all the files in the repo and will apply the changes in place when needed. After the script is done, please make sure to review and stage all those changes for the git commit.

Backward compatibility

Before submission, please remember to check if the code compiles fine on the supported compilers. The CI will check it anyway, but it is good to check at least some of the configurations before pushing changes. Especially older compilers can be tricky as those do not have full C++20 conformance. The official list of supported compilers can always be found in the C++ compiler support (API/ABI) chapter of our documentation.