Contributing

This is a FOSS project — anyone interested in using, developing, or contributing is welcome. The project follows a KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) philosophy.

Reporting Issues

• Open a ticket on the repository GitHub Issues page
• Clearly describe the problem, including steps to reproduce for bugs
• Note the earliest version you know has the issue

Pull Requests

1. Fork the repository on GitHub
2. Create a topic branch from master:

   git checkout -b fix/master/my_contribution master

3. Test your changes with FoBiS.py build -f src/tests/fobos && bash scripts/run_tests.sh
4. Check for unnecessary whitespace: git diff --check
5. Submit a pull request with a clear commit message

UTF-8 harness

The UTF-8 work (#51) is checked by three tools under scripts/, built with any compiler (FC=nvfortran ...); their products go to build/utf8/:

• bash scripts/oracle.sh SUITE: calls the methods on a corpus of byte strings (scripts/utf8/corpus.py: ASCII, UTF-8, every ill-formed class, Latin-1, binary) and compares each result with a Python reference (scripts/utf8/oracle.py, where every documented difference from Python is written). --list shows the suites.
• bash scripts/bench.sh run -o NEW.csv and bash scripts/bench.sh compare BASELINE.csv NEW.csv: timings of the methods the work touches; the comparison fails when an ASCII timing is more than 5% slower than the baseline in scripts/utf8/baselines/ (re-measure a failing timing before calling it a regression).
• python3 -I scripts/utf8/gen_unicode_tables.py: regenerates src/lib/stringifor_unicode_tables.F90 from the pinned Unicode Character Database; never edit that module by hand. --check verifies it.

The UTF-8 harness workflow runs the corpus self-test, the table checks and the oracle suites.

Fortran Coding Style

• Clarity over brevity: real :: gas_ideal_air is better than real :: gia
• Single-character variable names only for loop counters
• Name all constants
• implicit none in every module and program
• Declare intent for all procedure arguments, ordered: pass arg → inout → in → out → optional
• Indent with two spaces (not tabs)
• No trailing whitespace; blank lines must contain no spaces
• Use >, <, == instead of .gt., .lt., .eq.
• Avoid Windows-style CRLF line endings

Recommended git whitespace settings

[color]
  ui = true
[color "diff"]
  whitespace = red reverse
[core]
  whitespace = fix,-indent-with-non-tab,trailing-space,cr-at-eol

Commit style

Use Conventional Commits so that CHANGELOG.md is generated automatically from the git log:

Prefix	Purpose	Changelog section
feat:	New feature or capability	New features
fix:	Bug fix	Bug fixes
perf:	Performance improvement	Performance
refactor:	Code restructuring	Refactoring
docs:	Documentation only	Documentation
test:	Tests	Testing
build:	Build system	Build system
ci:	CI/CD pipeline	CI/CD
chore:	Maintenance	Miscellaneous

Append ! for breaking changes (feat!:, fix!:). Reference issues with #123 — they are auto-linked.

feat: add R32P kind parameter
fix: correct byte_size for character arrays (#42)
feat!: rename check_endian to init_endian

---

Creating a release

Releases are fully automated via scripts/bump.sh and GitHub Actions. The only steps needed are:

# Install git-cliff once
npx git-cliff@latest

# Then, to release:
scripts/bump.sh patch   # v1.2.3 → v1.2.4
scripts/bump.sh minor   # v1.2.3 → v1.3.0
scripts/bump.sh major   # v1.2.3 → v2.0.0
scripts/bump.sh v2.1.0  # explicit version

bump.sh will ask for confirmation, then:

1. Regenerate CHANGELOG.md from the git log via git-cliff
2. Commit with chore(release): vX.Y.Z
3. Create an annotated git tag
4. Push commit + tag

Pushing the tag triggers the GitHub Actions release workflow, which automatically:

• Runs the full test suite and uploads coverage to Codecov
• Builds this documentation site and deploys it to GitHub Pages
• Packages a versioned tarball StringiFor-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz
• Publishes a GitHub release with the changelog section as release notes