Contributing

Development happens on github and the preferred contribution method is by forking the repository and issuing a pull request. Alternatively, just sending a patch to luis@luispedro.org will work just as well.

If you don’t know git (or another distributed version control system), which is a fantastic tool in general, there are several good git and github tutorials. You can start with their official documentation.

If you want to work on the C++ code, you can read the chapter in the internals before you start. Also, read the principles declaration.

Debug Mode

If you compile mahotas in debug mode, then it will run slower but perform a lot of runtime checks. This is controlled by the DEBUG environment variable.

There are two levels:

  1. DEBUG=1 This turns on assertions. The code will run slower, but probably not noticeably slower, except for very large images.

  2. DEBUG=2 This turns on the assertions and additionally uses the debug version of the C++ library (this only works if you are using GCC). Some of the internal code also picks up on the DEBUG=2 and adds even more sanity checking. The result will be code that runs much slower as all operations done through iterators into standard containers are now checked (including many inner loop operations). However, it catches many errors.

The Makefile that comes with the source helps you:

make clean
make debug
make test

will rebuild in debug mode and run all tests. When you are done testing, use the fast Make target to get the non-debug build:

make clean
make fast

Using make will not change your environment. The DEBUG variable is set internally only.

If you don’t know about it, check out ccache which is a great tool if you are developing in compiled languages (this is not specific to mahotas or even Python). It will allow you to quickly perform make clean; make debug and make clean; make fast so you never get your builds mixed up.