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Contributing

This document outlines the ways to contribute to python-dateutil. This is a fairly small, low-traffic project, so most of the contribution norms (coding style, acceptance criteria) have been developed ad hoc and this document will not be exhaustive. If you are interested in contributing code or documentation, please take a moment to at least review the license section to understand how your code will be licensed.

Types of contribution

Bug reports

Bug reports are an important type of contribution - it's important to get feedback about how the library is failing, and there's no better way to do that than to hear about real-life failure cases. A good bug report will include:

  1. A minimal, reproducible example - a small, self-contained script that can reproduce the behavior is the best way to get your bug fixed. For more information and tips on how to structure these, read StackOverflow's guide to creating a minimal, complete, verified example.

  2. The platform and versions of everything involved, at a minimum please include operating system, python version and dateutil version. Instructions on getting your versions:

    • dateutil: python -c 'import dateutil; print(dateutil.__version__)'
    • Python: python --version

  3. A description of the problem - what is happening and what should happen.

While pull requests fixing bugs are accepted, they are not required - the bug report in itself is a great contribution.

Feature requests

If you would like to see a new feature in dateutil, it is probably best to start an issue for discussion rather than taking the time to implement a feature which may or may not be appropriate for dateutil's API. For minor features (ones where you don't have to put a lot of effort into the PR), a pull request is fine but still not necessary.

Pull requests

If you would like to fix something in dateutil - improvements to documentation, bug fixes, feature implementations, fixes to the build system, etc - pull requests are welcome! Where possible, try to keep your coding to PEP 8 style, with the minor modification that the existing dateutil class naming style does not use the CapWords convention, or where the existing style does not follow PEP 8.

The most important thing to include in your pull request are tests - please write one or more tests to cover the behavior you intend your patch to improve. Ideally, tests would use only the public interface - try to get 100% difference coverage using only supported behavior of the API.

Changelog

To keep users abreast of the changes to the module and to give proper credit, dateutil maintains a changelog, which is managed by towncrier. To add a changelog entry, make a new file called <issue_no>.<type>.rst, where <issue_no> is the number of the PR you've just made (it's easiest to add the changelog after you've created the PR so you'll have this number), and <type> is one of the following types:

  • feature: A new feature, (e.g. a new function, method, attribute, etc)
  • bugfix: A fix to a bug
  • doc: A change to the documentation
  • deprecation: Used if deprecating a feature or dropping support for a Python version.
  • misc: A change that has no interesting effect for end users, such as fixes to the test suite or CI.

PRs that include a feature or bugfix and a deprecation should create a separate entry for the deprecation.

{description of changes}. Reported by @{reporter} (gh issue #{issue_no}). Fixed by @{patch submitter} (gh pr #{pr_no})

An example changelog entry might be:

581.bugfix.rst

Fixed issue where the tz.tzstr constructor would erroneously succeed if passed
an invalid value for tzstr. Reported by @pganssle (gh issue #259). Fixed by
@pablogsal (gh pr #581)

For bugs reported and fixed by the same person use "Reported and fixed by @{patch submitter}". It is not necessary to create a github issue just for the purpose of mentioning it in the changelog, if the PR is the report, mentioning the PR is enough.

License

Starting December 1, 2017, all contributions will be assumed to be released under a dual license - the Apache 2.0 License and the 3-Clause BSD License unless otherwise specified in the pull request.

All contributions before December 1, 2017 except those explicitly relicensed, are only under the 3-clause BSD license.

Development Setup

Using a virtual environment

It is advisable to work in a virtual environment for development of dateutil. This can be done using virtualenv:

python -m virtualenv .venv      # Create virtual environment in .venv directory
source .venv/bin/activate       # Activate the virtual environment

Alternatively you can create a conda environment:

conda create -n dateutil                # Create a conda environment
# conda create -n dateutil python=3.6   # Or specify a version
source activate dateutil                # Activate the conda environment

Once your virtual environment is created, install the library in development mode:

pip install -e .

This will allow scripts run in your virtual environment to use the version of dateutil in your local directory. If you also want to run the tests in your local directory, install the test dependencies:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Testing

The best way to test dateutil is to run tox. By default, tox will test against all supported versions of Python installed on your system. To limit the number of tests, run a specific subset of environments. For example, to run only on Python 2.7 and Python 3.6:

tox -e py27,py36

You can also pass arguments to pytest through tox by placing them after --:

tox -e py36 -- -m tzstr

This will pass the -m tzstr parameter to pytest, running only the tests with the tzstr mark.

The tests can also be run directly by running pytest or python -m pytest in the root directory. This will be likely be less thorough but is often faster and is a good first pass to check your changes.

All GitHub pull requests are automatically tested using Travis and Appveyor.