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Getting help, contributing and reporting problems

General mailing list

The kwant-discuss mailing list is the main public communication platform for anything related to Kwant: questions, bug reports, discussions, and announcements. You can use it in various ways:

Development list

Those who are interested (or would like to participate) in the further development of Kwant are invited to subscribe to the kwant-devel mailing list. This is the place for technical discussions about changes to Kwant. Please do not send bug reports to this list but rather to kwant-discuss.

Kwant-devel works in the same way as kwant-discuss:

Announcements (low-volume)

This read-only list is reserved for important announcements like new releases of Kwant. Only a few messages will be sent per year. These announcements will be also posted on the main mailing list, so there is no need to subscribe to both lists. We recommend every user of Kwant to subscribe at least to this list in order to stay informed about new developments.

Reporting bugs

If you encounter a problem with Kwant, first try to reproduce it with as simple a system as possible. Double-check with the documentation that what you observe is actually a bug in Kwant. If you think it is, please check whether the problem is already known by searching the general mailing list. (You may use the search box at the top of this page.)

If the problem is not known yet, please send a bug report to kwant-discuss@kwant-project.org. A report should contain:

  • The versions of software you are using (Kwant, Python, operating system, etc.)
  • A description of the problem, i.e. what exactly goes wrong.
  • Enough information to reproduce the bug, preferably in the form of a simple script.

Contributing

We see Kwant not just as a package with fixed functionality, but rather as a framework for implementing different physics-related algorithms using a common set of concepts and, if possible, a shared interface. We have designed it leaving room for growth, and plan to keep extending it.

External contributions to Kwant are highly welcome. You can help to advance the project not only by writing code, but also by reporting bugs, and fixing/improving the documentation.

If you have some code that works well with Kwant, or extends it in some useful way, please consider sharing it. Any external contribution will be clearly marked as such, and relevant papers will be added to the list of suggested acknowledgements. The complete development history is also made available through a web interface. If you plan to contribute, it is best to coordinate with us in advance either through the development mailing list kwant-devel@kwant-project.org, or directly at authors@kwant-project.org for matters that you prefer to not discuss publicly.

How to contribute

We use the version control system Git to coordinate the development of Kwant. If you are new to Git, we invite you to learn its basics. (There's a plethora of information available on the Web.) Kwant's Git repository contains not only the source code, but also all of the reference documentation and the tutorial.

It is best to base your work on the latest version of Kwant:

git clone https://gitlab.kwant-project.org/kwant/kwant.git

Then you can build Kwant and the documentation as described in the build instructions.

The Kwant git repository has two main branches: The branch master contains the development towards the next release. The branch stable contains the most recent release that is considered stable, and only bugfixes are applied to it.

We recommend that you keep your changes on a separate topic branch that starts at master. To create such a branch, use the command:

git checkout -b my_topic_branch master

Once you have something that you would like to share, let us know about it by posting to kwant-devel@kwant-project.org. We are happy to receive useful contributions in any reasonable way: you can send patches to the mailing list, make your git repository available on the web (you could use a service like github), or even directly send the file that you modified.

The recommended way is sending patches to the mailing list. (This avoids confusion by publishing unfinished git branches and allows code review.) See this example of usage and this git send-email howto, it’s easy.

Some things to keep in mind:

A useful trick for working on the source code is to build in-place so that there is no need to re-install after each change. This can be done with the following command

python setup.py build_ext -i --cython

The kwant subdirectory of the source distribution will be thus turned into a proper Python package that can be imported. To be able to import Kwant from within Python, one can either work in the root directory of the distribution (where the subdirectory kwant is located), or make a (symbolic) link from somewhere in the Python search path to the the package subdirectory.

The option --cython enables the translation of .pyx files into .c files. It is only needed if any .pyx files have been modified.