If you wish to contribute to this project, please first discuss any proposed changes with the owners and main developers. You may do that either through making an issue at our official GitHub presence https://github.com/ViennaRNA/ViennaRNA, by email (rna@tbi.univie.ac.at), or any other personal communication with the core developer team.
Please note that we have a code of conduct. Please follow it in all your interactions with this project.
- Please make an issue at GitHub or notify us by emailing to rna@tbi.univie.ac.at
- In your report, include as much information as possible, such that we are able to reproduce it. If possible, find a minimal example that triggers the bug.
- Include the version number for the ViennaRNA Package you experience the bug with.
- Include at least some minimal information regarding your operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, etc.)
- Ensure that you have not checked-in any files that are automatically build!
- When contributing C source code, follow our code formatting guide lines. You
may use the tool
uncrustify
together with our config located inmisc/uncrustify.cfg
to accomplish that. - Only expose symbols (functions, variables, etc.) to the libraries interface that are
absolutely necessary! Hide all other symbols in the corresponding object file(s) by
declaring them as
static
. - Use the prefixes
vrna_
for any symbol you add to the API of our library! Preprocessor macros in header files require the prefix in capital letters, i.e.VRNA_
. - Use C-style comments at any place necessary to make sure your implementation can still be understood and followed in the future.
- Add test cases for any new implementation! The test suite is located in the
tests
directory and is split into tests for the C-library, executable programs, and the individual scripting language interfaces. - Run
make check
to ensure that all other test suites still run properly with your applied changes! - When contributing via GitHub, make a personal fork of our project and create a separate
branch for your changes. Then make a pull request to our
user-contrib
branch. Pull requests to themaster
branch will be rejected to keep its history clean. - Pull requests that have been successfully merged into the
user-contrib
branch usually find their way into the next release of the ViennaRNA Package. However, please note that the core developers may decide to include your changes in a later version.