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Developer documentation

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome. Before starting work on larger features it’s recommended to coordinate design ideas through GitHub issues. Existing open issues may sometimes no longer be useful, have already been solved, or the notes on solving a particular problem may be outdated. Issues that we think are easier for someone new to the project to get started with are labeled on the issue tracker.

Building documentation

Building pika’s documentation requires doxygen, sphinx, as well the sphinx extensions and themes listed in docs/requirements.txt. Building the documentation is not done through CMake as the rest of pika. Assuming SOURCE_DIR is set to the pika source directory, and BUILD_DIR is set to a build directory (e.g. $SOURCE_DIR/build), you first need to export the following environment variables for doxygen:

export PIKA_DOCS_DOXYGEN_INPUT_ROOT="$SOURCE_DIR"
export PIKA_DOCS_DOXYGEN_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY="$BUILD_DIR/docs/doxygen"

Then generate the doxygen XML files using:

doxygen "$SOURCE_DIR/docs/Doxyfile"

Finally, build the sphinx documentation using:

sphinx-build -W -b html "$SOURCE_DIR/docs" "$BUILD_DIR/docs"

Assuming the build finished without errors, the HTML documentation will now be in $BUILD_DIR/docs with the entry point being $BUILD_DIR/docs/index.html.

Doxygen only needs to be rerun if the source code documentation has changed. See the doxygen and sphinx documentation for more information on using the tools.

Release procedure

The current target is to produce a new (minor) release once a month. See milestones for the planned dates for the next releases.

pika follows Semantic Versioning.

  1. For minor and major releases: create and check out a new branch at an appropriate point on main with the name release-major.minor.X. major and minor should be the major and minor versions of the release. For patch releases: check out the corresponding release-major.minor.X branch.

  2. Write release notes in docs/changelog.md. Check for issues and pull requests for the release on the pika planning board. Check for items that do not have a release associated to them on the Done view. Assign them to a release if needed.

  3. Make sure PIKA_VERSION_MAJOR/MINOR/PATCH in CMakeLists.txt contain the correct values. Change them if needed.

  4. Update the version in the CITATION.cff file (both in the title and the version field).

  5. When making a post-1.0.0 major release, remove deprecated functionality if appropriate.

  6. Update the minimum required versions if necessary.

  7. Check that projects dependent on pika are passing CI with pika main branch. Check if there is no performance regressions due to the pika upgrade in those projects.

  8. Repeat the following steps until satisfied with the release.

    1. Change PIKA_VERSION_TAG in CMakeLists.txt to -rcN, where N is the current iteration of this step. Start with -rc1.

    2. Create a pre-release on GitHub using the script tools/roll_release.sh. This script automatically tags with the corresponding release number.

    3. Add patches as needed to the release candidate until the next release candidate, or the final release.

  9. Change PIKA_VERSION_TAG in CMakeLists.txt to an empty string.

  10. Add the release date to the caption of the current docs/changelog.md section and change the value of PIKA_VERSION_DATE in CMakeLists.txt.

  11. Create a release on GitHub using the script tools/roll_release.sh. This script automatically tags the release with the corresponding release number. You’ll need to set GITHUB_TOKEN or both GITHUB_USER and GITHUB_PASSWORD for the hub release command. When creating a GITHUB_TOKEN, the only access necessary is public_repo.

  12. Merge release branch into main (with –no-ff).

  13. Modify the release procedure if necessary.

  14. Change PIKA_VERSION_TAG in CMakeLists.txt back to -trunk.

  15. Update spack (https://github.com/spack/spack).

  16. Clean up the pika planning board:

    • Move the version-specific views one release forward (e.g. change the name and filter of pika 0.X.0 to pika 0.<X+1>.0).

    • Change the status of Done items to Archive in the Done view.

  17. Delete your GITHUB_TOKEN if created only for the release.

  18. Announce the release on the #pika slack channel.