Developers’ guide¶
These instructions are for developing on a Unix-like platform, e.g. Linux or Mac OS X, with the bash shell.
Getting the source code¶
We use the Mercurial version control system. To get a copy of the code you should fork the main Sumatra repository on Bitbucket, then clone your own fork.:
$ cd /some/directory
$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/<username>/sumatra sumatra_src
If you get an SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE
error, you can either use the
--insecure
option to hg clone, or add the following lines
to your ~/.hgrc
file:
[hostfingerprints]
bitbucket.org = 45:ad:ae:1a:cf:0e:73:47:06:07:e0:88:f5:cc:10:e5:fa:1c:f7:99
Note
this is the fingerprint used by BitBucket at the time of writing. You can get the latest one by visiting the site with a web browser and inspecting the certificate (look for the SHA1 fingerprint).
Now you need to make sure that the sumatra
package is on your PYTHONPATH and
that the smt
and smtweb
scripts are on your PATH. You can do this either
by installing Sumatra:
$ cd sumatra_src
$ python setup.py install
(if you do this, you will have to re-run setup.py install
any time you make
changes to the code) or by installing using pip
with the “editable” option:
$ pip install --editable sumatra_src
To update to the latest version from the repository:
$ hg pull -u
Note
Please do not use Mercurial branches, use bookmarks instead (these are the closest equivalent to Git branches).
Running the test suite¶
Before you make any changes, run the test suite to make sure all the tests pass on your system:
$ cd sumatra_src/test/unittests
$ nosetests
You will see some error messages, but don’t worry - these are just tests of Sumatra’s error handling. At the end, if you see “OK”, then all the tests passed, otherwise it will report how many tests failed or produced errors.
If any of the tests fail, check out the continuous integration server to see if these are “known” failures, otherwise please open a bug report.
(many thanks to the NEST Initiative for hosting the CI server).
Writing tests¶
You should try to write automated tests for any new code that you add. If you have found a bug and want to fix it, first write a test that isolates the bug (and that therefore fails with the existing codebase). Then apply your fix and check that the test now passes.
To see how well the tests cover the code base, run:
$ nosetests --coverage --cover-package=sumatra --cover-erase
Committing your changes¶
Once you are happy with your changes, you can commit them to your local copy of the repository:
$ hg commit -m 'informative commit message'
and then push them to your Bitbucket repository:
$ hg push
Before pushing, run the test suite again to check that you have not introduced any new bugs.
Once you are ready for your work to be merged into the main Sumatra repository, please open a pull request.