GNU Astronomy Utilities



13.10 Gnuastro project webpage

Gnuastro’s central management hub304 is located on GNU Savannah305. Savannah is the central software development management system for many GNU projects. Through this central hub, you can view the list of activities that the developers are engaged in, their activity on the version controlled source, and other things. Each defined activity in the development cycle is known as an ‘issue’ (or ‘item’). An issue can be a bug (see Report a bug), or a suggested feature (see Suggest new feature) or an enhancement or generally any one job that is to be done. In Savannah, issues are classified into three categories or ‘tracker’s:

Support

This tracker is a way that (possibly anonymous) users can get in touch with the Gnuastro developers. It is a complement to the bug-gnuastro mailing list (see Report a bug). Anyone can post an issue to this tracker. The developers will not submit an issue to this list. They will only reassign the issues in this list to the other two trackers if they are valid306. Ideally (when the developers have time to put on Gnuastro, please do not forget that Gnuastro is a volunteer effort), there should be no open items in this tracker.

Bugs

This tracker contains all the known bugs in Gnuastro (problems with the existing tools).

Tasks

The items in this tracker contain the future plans (or new features/capabilities) that are to be added to Gnuastro.

All the trackers can be browsed by a (possibly anonymous) visitor, but to edit and comment on the Bugs and Tasks trackers, you have to be a registered on Savannah. When posting an issue to a tracker, it is very important to choose the ‘Category’ and ‘Item Group’ options accurately. The first contains a list of all Gnuastro’s programs along with ‘Installation’, ‘New program’ and ‘Webpage’. The “Item Group” contains the nature of the issue, for example, if it is a ‘Crash’ in the software (a bug), or a problem in the documentation (also a bug) or a feature request or an enhancement.

The set of horizontal links on the top of the page (Starting with ‘Main’ and ‘Homepage’ and finishing with ‘News’) are the easiest way to access these trackers (and other major aspects of the project) from any part of the project web page. Hovering your mouse over them will open a drop down menu that will link you to the different things you can do on each tracker (for example, ‘Submit new’ or ‘Browse’). When you browse each tracker, you can use the “Display Criteria” link above the list to limit the displayed issues to what you are interested in. The ‘Category’ and ‘Group Item’ (explained above) are a good starting point.

Any new issue that is submitted to any of the trackers, or any comments that are posted for an issue, is directly forwarded to the gnuastro-devel mailing list (https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnuastro-devel, see Developing mailing lists for more). This will allow anyone interested to be up to date on the over-all development activity in Gnuastro and will also provide an alternative (to Savannah) archiving for the development discussions. Therefore, it is not recommended to directly post an email to this mailing list, but do all the activities (for example add new issues, or comment on existing ones) on Savannah.

Do I need to be a member in Savannah to contribute to Gnuastro? No.

The full version controlled history of Gnuastro is available for anonymous download or cloning. See Production workflow for a description of Gnuastro’s Integration-Manager Workflow. In short, you can either send in patches, or make your own fork. If you choose the latter, you can push your changes to your own fork and inform us. We will then pull your changes and merge them into the main project. Please see Forking tutorial for a tutorial.


Footnotes

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https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnuastro/

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https://savannah.gnu.org/

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Some of the issues registered here might be due to a mistake on the user’s side, not an actual bug in the program.