Write developer guidelines

[FilippoOggionni]

Write developer guidelines (as from this Slack post).

[FilippoOggionni]

A draft is available here.

Waiting for review from @DominicDirkx @gaffarelj @geoffreygarrett 😃

[gaffarelj]

Great guide, I made some minor changes with 4a2fd66.

I would just say that all of this is very clear to me, but things may be more obscure to new developers. Especially, it may be good to add a small paragraph at the beginning of the guide to link to the DevOps resources section. This way, if things seem obscure, help does not seem too far. (Especially how tudat is organised in many repositories. You mention multiple times that there is tudat in C++, tudatpy in Python, tudat-multidocs, etc... but I don't know if devs that read this page should already be used to all of these or not.)

[FilippoOggionni]

Good point! I think including a page somewhere about the organization of the tudat ecosystem (all the repos, what they are meant for, etc...) is a great idea and very much needed. I already have some ideas about that and some material written in a README, so I will take care of that. This page should be the first things developers read / come across in the developer docs, in my opinion.

Question: do you think developers should read first the DevOps resources sections or first the checklist? In other words, do you think a developer needs to know the content from the resources before being able to understand the checklist?

[gaffarelj]

Question: do you think developers should read first the DevOps resources sections or first the checklist? In other words, do you think a developer needs to know the content from the resources before being able to understand the checklist?

I prefer having the checklist first, and resources second. But mentioning that the resources section exists at the beginning of the page could be useful.

[FilippoOggionni]

But mentioning that the resources section exists at the beginning of the page could be useful.

Sounds good, I will do that!

Regarding the overview page, do you have already an idea of where it could be placed in the toctree?

[FilippoOggionni]

I added the following note, do you think it is enough?

[FilippoOggionni]

Changes have been implemented through 0ce93aa (and published on the website at latest).

[gaffarelj]

I added the following note, do you think it is enough?

Yes, I think nothing more would be needed, perfect for me :)

Regarding the overview page, do you have already an idea of where it could be placed in the toctree?

I would expect to find it at the top of the Software Development section (before the Build System and Developer Environment sections). Actually, I believe the Developer Environment section already covers most of what the overview page would describe. But I think the overview should go less into details, and give a more general... well... overview.

As a small note, I would also switch the sections in the following order: Software Development, Software Documentation, Dev Ops.

[DominicDirkx]

Hi all, sorry to be late to the party :) I have made a couple of very small modifications. Below a few suggestions/requests:

• It would be good to put contact info at the top of the page: if anyone is interested in contributing to Tudat, I think we should encourage them to contact us, if they have not yet.
• In the description here: https://tudat-developer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/primer/devops.html#checklist-for-developer
  I think it's good to write that we assume that people are working from the tudat-bundle
• In step 2b-2e here: https://tudat-developer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/primer/devops.html#checklist-for-reviewer a (link to) a more elaborate desciption is needed
• This tip: https://github.com/tudat-team/tudat-developer-docs/blame/develop/source/primer/devops.rst#L83 is no clear to me, could you add how/why this is different from the other repos?
• These links: https://github.com/tudat-team/tudat-developer-docs/blame/develop/source/primer/devops.rst#L95 should be a bit higher, to make clear to a developer, who may not want to read everything ;), that we have support pages for this
• I see that the versioning guide: https://tudat-developer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/primer/devops/versioning.html#releasing-a-new-version-with-bumpversion only refers to the documentation. This should be extended to tudat and tudatpy, making clear the distinction (or lack thereof?) of version for the code (on Github) and the package (on Anaconda)