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Developer's Guide for Setuptools
================================

If you want to know more about contributing on Setuptools, this is the place.


.. contents:: **Table of Contents**


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Recommended Reading
-------------------

Please read `How to write the perfect pull request
<https://blog.jaraco.com/how-to-write-perfect-pull-request/>`_ for some tips
on contributing to open source projects. Although the article is not
authoritative, it was authored by the maintainer of Setuptools, so reflects
his opinions and will improve the likelihood of acceptance and quality of
contribution.

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Project Management
------------------

Setuptools is maintained primarily in Github at `this home
<https://github.com/pypa/setuptools>`_. Setuptools is maintained under the
Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) with several core contributors. All bugs
for Setuptools are filed and the canonical source is maintained in Github.

User support and discussions are done through the issue tracker (for specific)
issues, through the distutils-sig mailing list, or on IRC (Freenode) at
#pypa.

Discussions about development happen on the pypa-dev mailing list or on
`Gitter <https://gitter.im/pypa/setuptools>`_.

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Authoring Tickets
-----------------

Before authoring any source code, it's often prudent to file a ticket
describing the motivation behind making changes. First search to see if a
ticket already exists for your issue. If not, create one. Try to think from
the perspective of the reader. Explain what behavior you expected, what you
got instead, and what factors might have contributed to the unexpected
behavior. In Github, surround a block of code or traceback with the triple
backtick "\`\`\`" so that it is formatted nicely.

Filing a ticket provides a forum for justification, discussion, and
clarification. The ticket provides a record of the purpose for the change and
any hard decisions that were made. It provides a single place for others to
reference when trying to understand why the software operates the way it does
or why certain changes were made.

Setuptools makes extensive use of hyperlinks to tickets in the changelog so
that system integrators and other users can get a quick summary, but then
jump to the in-depth discussion about any subject referenced.

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Source Code
-----------

Grab the code at Github::

    $ git checkout https://github.com/pypa/setuptools

If you want to contribute changes, we recommend you fork the repository on
Github, commit the changes to your repository, and then make a pull request
on Github. If you make some changes, don't forget to:

- add a note in CHANGES.rst

Please commit all changes in the 'master' branch against the latest available
commit or for bug-fixes, against an earlier commit or release in which the
bug occurred.

If you find yourself working on more than one issue at a time, Setuptools
generally prefers Git-style branches, so use Mercurial bookmarks or Git
branches or multiple forks to maintain separate efforts.

The Continuous Integration tests that validate every release are run
from this repository.

For posterity, the old `Bitbucket mirror
<https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools>`_ is available.

-------
Testing
-------

The primary tests are run using tox. To run the tests, first make
sure you have tox installed, then invoke it::

    $ tox

Under continuous integration, additional tests may be run. See the
``.travis.yml`` file for full details on the tests run under Travis-CI.

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Semantic Versioning
-------------------

Setuptools follows ``semver``.

.. explain value of reflecting meaning in versions.

----------------------
Building Documentation
----------------------

Setuptools relies on the Sphinx system for building documentation.
To accommodate RTD, docs must be built from the docs/ directory.

To build them, you need to have installed the requirements specified
in docs/requirements.txt. One way to do this is to use rwt:

    setuptools/docs$ python -m rwt -r requirements.txt -- -m sphinx . html