Contributing to Boost.Histogram

Star the project

If you like Boost.Histogram, please star the project on Github! We want Boost.Histogram to be the best histogram library out there. If you give it a star, it becomes more visible and will gain more users. More users mean more user feedback to make the library even better.

Support

Feel free to ask questions on https://gitter.im/boostorg/histogram.

Reporting Issues

We value your feedback about issues you encounter. The more information you provide the easier it is for developers to resolve the problem.

Issues should be reported to the issue tracker.

Issues can also be used to submit feature requests.

Don't be shy: if you are friendly, we are friendly!

Submitting Pull Requests

Fork the main repository. Base your changes on the develop branch. Make a new branch for any feature or bug-fix in your fork. Start developing. You can start a pull request when you feel the change is ready for review.

Please rebase your branch to the original develop branch before submitting (which may have diverged from your fork in the meantime).

Running Tests

With cmake

You can build and test Boost Histogram with cmake, but this is experimental. It is very convenient, however, as it does not require setting up the Boost superproject, you just need a checkout of Boost Histogram, but when you need to recompile many times, it is slower than using b2 (see next section). The following steps compile the tests with cmake

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
cmake --build . --target check -j3

Increase -j3 to the number of jobs that you want to run in parallel.

With b2

For general advice on how to set up the Boost project for development, see the Getting Started section on https://github.com/boostorg/wiki/wiki.

Boost comes with a build system called b2, which is the most efficient way to run the develop-test cycle. It takes a few extra steps and some reading to set up, but the payoff is worth it in the long run. After following the general advice from the Boost wiki, you should be all set up to run the tests from the Boost Histogram project folder with the command

../../b2 cxxstd=latest warnings-as-errors=on test

You can also test the examples by executing

../../b2 cxxstd=latest examples

To make the tests complete faster, you can use the option -j4 (or another number) to build in parallel.

Generate documentation

To build the documentation, you need to install a few extra things, see Quickbook documentation.

Using b2filt

The output of b2 is verbose and there is no highlighting, so sometimes it is difficult to spot a problem. You can give b2filt are try, which you can install with pip install b2filt. Just replace ../../b2 with b2filt, for example:

b2filt cxxstd=latest warnings-as-errors=on test

Note: b2filt is not an official part of Boost and has never been tested extensively on Windows. Please leave an issue on GitHub if you have trouble with b2filt.

Reporting failures

Please report any tests failures to the issue tracker along with the test output and information on your system:

• platform (Linux, Windows, OSX, ...)
• compiler and version

Test coverage

Boost.Histogram maintains 100% line coverage. Coverage is automatically checked by CI. To generate a report locally, you need to build the code with gcc-8 and coverage instrumentation enabled, do b2 toolset=gcc-8 cxxstd=latest coverage=on test. To generate the coverage report, run tools/cov.sh from the project root directory of Boost.Histogram. This will generate a new folder coverage-report with a HTML report. Open coverage-report/index.html in a browser.

Notes: Generating coverage data is very fickle. You need to use gcc-5 or gcc-8 and a matching version of gcov, other gcc versions (6, 7, 9) are known to be broken or are not supported by lcov, which is used to process the raw coverage data. Generating coverage data with clang and llvm-cov is not supported by lcov. The best results are obtained with gcc-5. gcc-8 is known to report lines as missed which are impossible to miss.

Coding Style

Follow the Boost Library Requirements and Guidelines and the established style in Boost.Histogram.

Code formatting

Using clang-format -style=file is recommended, which should pick up the .clang-format file of the project. All names are written with small letters and _. Template parameters are capitalized and in camel-case.

Documentation

Doxygen comments should be added for all user-facing functions and methods. Implementation details are not documented (everything in the boost::histogram::detail namespace is an implementation detail that can change at any time).