Contribute

There are two ways to contribute to Concrete-ML or to Concrete tools in general:

• You can open issues to report bugs and typos and to suggest ideas.

• You can ask to become an official contributor by emailing [e-mail]. Only approved contributors can send pull requests (PR), so please make sure to get in touch before you do!

Let's go over some other important things that you need to be careful about.

Creating a new branch

We are using a consistent branch naming scheme, and you are expected to follow it as well. Here is the format, along with some examples:

git checkout -b {feat|fix|refactor|test|benchmark|doc|style|chore}/short-description_$issue_id

e.g.

git checkout -b feat/explicit-tlu_11
git checkout -b fix/tracing_indexing_42

Before committing

Conformance.

Each commit to Concrete-ML should conform to the standards decided by the team.

You can let the development tools fix some issues automatically with the following command:

make conformance

Conformance can be checked using the following command:

make pcc

Pytest.

Of course, tests must pass as well.

make pytest

Coverage.

The last requirement is to make sure you get 100 percent code coverage. The make pytest command checks that by default and will fail with a coverage report at the end should some lines of your code not be executed during testing.

If your coverage is below 100 percent, you should write more tests and then create the pull request (PR). If you ignore this warning and create the PR, GitHub actions will fail and your PR will not be merged.

There may be cases where covering your code is not possible (an exception that cannot be triggered in normal execution circumstances). In those cases, you may be allowed to disable coverage for some specific lines. This should be the exception rather than the rule, and reviewers will ask why some lines are not covered. If it appears they can be covered, then the PR won't be accepted in that state.

Committing

We are using a consistent commit naming scheme, and you are expected to follow it as well (the CI will make sure you do). The accepted format can be printed to your terminal by running:

make show_scope

e.g.

git commit -m "feat: implement bounds checking"
git commit -m "feat(debugging): add an helper function to draw intermediate representation"
git commit -m "fix(tracing): fix a bug that crashed pytorch tracer"

To learn more about conventional commits, check this page. Just a reminder that commit messages are checked in the comformance step, and rejected if they don't follow the rules.

Before creating a pull request

We remind you that only official contributors can send pull requests. To become an official contributor, please email [e-mail].

You should rebase on top of the main branch before you create your pull request. We don't allow merge commits, so rebasing on main before pushing gives you the best chance of avoiding having to rewrite parts of your PR later if some conflicts arise with other PRs being merged. After you commit your changes to your new branch, you can use the following commands to rebase:

# fetch the list of active remote branches
git fetch --all --prune

# checkout to main
git checkout main

# pull the latest changes to main (--ff-only is there to prevent accidental commits to main)
git pull --ff-only

# checkout back to your branch
git checkout $YOUR_BRANCH

# rebase on top of main branch
git rebase main

# If there are conflicts during the rebase, resolve them
# and continue the rebase with the following command
git rebase --continue

# push the latest version of the local branch to remote
git push --force

You can learn more about rebasing here.