1. Obtaining the Source Code

This package is designed to be a repository for well-written astronomy code, and submissions of new routines are encouraged. After installing the version-control system git, you can check out the latest sources from github using:

git clone git://github.com/astroML/astroML.git

or if you have write privileges:

git clone git@github.com:astroML/astroML.git

2. Contribution

We strongly encourage contributions of useful astronomy-related code: for astroML to be a relevant tool for the python/astronomy community, it will need to grow with the field of research. There are a few guidelines for contribution:

2.1. General

Any contribution should be done through the github pull request system (for more information, see the help page Code submitted to astroML should conform to a BSD-style license, and follow the PEP8 style guide.

2.2. Tests

All submitted code should be tested using the nose testing framework. For examples of how these tests work, see the tests within the astroML package and each of its submodules.

2.3. Documentation and Examples

All submitted code should be documented following the Numpy Documentation Guide. This is a unified documentation style used by many packages in the scipy universe.

In addition, it is highly recommended to create example scripts that show the usefulness of the method on an astronomical dataset (preferably making use of datasets available through astroML.datasets). Some of these example scripts can be seen in the examples subdirectory of the main source repository: examples_root.