GitHub

Development

Development is done in the dev branch, in feature branches, or in personal forks of the repository. Changes can only be merged into main if the CI tests are passing and the Git history is linear.

Style Guide

  • Source files are automatically formatted with JuliaFormatter using the configuration file that is included in the repository.
  • The Git history is kept linear (rebasing instead of merging) and unrelated changes should be in separate commits. For the commit messages, a short, capitalized message using imperative mood is preferred (see this article).

Helper Commands

To simplify common development tasks, the repository includes recipes for the just command runner. If you have just installed, you can run it without arguments in the repository directory to list the available recipes, and then just RECIPE to run one of the recipes.

Some useful recipes:

  • just repl: Start a Julia REPL with the PointClouds package already imported.
  • just test: Run all the tests, or only the tests from a specific file with e.g. just test io for test/io_test.jl.
  • just format: Run JuliaFormatter for all the files in the src and test directories.
  • just servedocs [--skip-tests]: Run the documentation website locally with live updates; --skip-tests disables doctests for faster iteration.
  • just benchmark <file>...: Measure the performance of a few critical operations for one or several LAS/LAZ file(s).

You can refer to the justfile for details, or if you want to copy a recipe to a script that can be run without having just installed. The just recipes are also used for the GitHub actions that are run whenever new commits are pushed to the repository.

Creating a Release

  1. Make sure that all tests pass (including doctests) and that the automatic formatting has run over all new code.
  2. Create a new commit that updates the version number in Project.toml.
  3. Push the commit to a development branch and make sure that all the CI checks are passing.
  4. Push or merge the commit into the main branch and comment @JuliaRegistrator register on the commit.
  5. Wait for the new version to be published in the Julia package registry.
  6. Create a new tag with git tag v0.0.0 and push it to GitHub with git push origin v0.0.0 (substitute version number).