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Contributing to the Norwegian Earth System Model

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Introduction

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min
Questions

  • What do we need to be able to contribute?

  • What contribution is welcome?

Objectives

  • Understand what access is required to contribute to NorESM

  • Understand what contribution is welcome

Accessing to NorESM

NorESM webpage

The latest NorESM documentation is openly available on ReadTheDocs at https://noresm-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

For accessing the documentation, a modern web browser is requested. If you wish to update the documentation, you would need a Github account. This will be discussed in depth in the next episode.

NorESM source code

The NorESM source code is not openly available and access to the source code needs to be requested. If you do not have access to NorESM source code, make sure to obtain a copy of the model (using git) before going further into the lesson.

There are two github repositories for NorESM (both private github repositories):

The NorESM team does not consistently create releases and it is usually impossible to guess which branch to use to run a NorESM simulation. Therefore, you would need to ask (for instance when you request access to NorESM github repository) which repository and what branch to use.

Contribute to NorESM

Remark:

To contribute to NorESM, you would need (at least) a Github account. If you do not have one yet, join Github here. For more information, read setup instructions.

There are many ways to contribute to NorESM and in this lesson, we will mostly discuss how to contribute to the NorESM documentation and to the NorESM source code.

Contributor Agreement

By contributing, you agree that we may redistribute your work; the license agreement depends on where you contribute. The NorESM documentation is distributed under CC BY 4.0.

There is no license agreement for NorESM: NorESM does not have a license and is not an open and publicly available software.

In all cases, we will try to address your issues and/or assess your change proposal as promptly as we can, acknowledge your contributions.

Everyone involved in Norwegian Earth System Modeling hub agrees to abide by our code of conduct.

How to Contribute

The easiest way to get started is to file an issue to tell us about a spelling mistake, some awkward wording, or a factual error. This is a good way to introduce yourself and to meet some of our community members.

  1. If you have a GitHub account, or are willing to create one, but do not know how to use Git, you can report problems or suggest improvements by creating an issue. This allows us to assign the item to someone and to respond to it in a threaded discussion.

  2. If you are comfortable with Git, and would like to add or change material, you can browse the list of existing issues (see below) and submit a pull request (PR). Instructions for doing this are included below.

Where to Contribute

  1. If you wish to change this repository, please work in https://github.com/NorESMhub/INES_workshop_2019, which can be viewed at https://noresmhub.github.io/INES_workshop_2019/.

  2. If you wish to change another repository in the NorESMhub organization, please review CONTRIBUTING.md guideline of the corresponding repository. In the section below, we list priority areas but these are mostly to help you to find where to contribute.

  3. If you wish to add a new repository in the NorESMhub organization, create a new issue in this repository. Do not forget to mention the purpose of your issue.

What to Contribute

There are many ways to contribute, from writing new tools and improving existing ones to updating or filling in the documentation and submitting bug reports about things that don’t work, aren’t clear, or are missing. If you are looking for ideas, please see the ‘Issues’ tab for a list of issues associated with each repository.

Comments on issues and reviews of pull requests are just as welcome: we are smarter together than we are on our own. Reviews from novices and newcomers are particularly valuable: it’s easy for people who have been using these lessons for a while to forget how impenetrable some of this material can be, so fresh eyes are always welcome.

Priorities

Here is a non-exhaustive list of repositories for which we need your help:

Using GitHub

If you choose to contribute via GitHub, you may want to look at How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub. To manage changes, we follow GitHub flow.

Each issues and pull requests are reviewed by volunteers and we also encourage you to do so. The repository owners have final say over what gets merged into the lesson so it is often good practice to discuss your plans in an issue before you implement anything.

To use the web interface for contributing to a lesson:

  1. Fork the originating repository to your GitHub profile.
  2. Within your version of the forked repository, move to the master branch and create a new branch for each significant change being made.
  3. Navigate to the file(s) you wish to change within the new branches and make revisions as required.
  4. Commit all changed files within the appropriate branches.
  5. Create individual pull requests from each of your changed branches to the master branch within the originating repository.
  6. If you receive feedback, make changes using your issue-specific branches of the forked repository and the pull requests will update automatically.
  7. Repeat as needed until all feedback has been addressed.

When starting work, please make sure your clone of the originating master branch is up-to-date before creating your own revision-specific branch(es) from there. Additionally, please only work from your newly-created branch(es) and not your clone of the originating master branch.

Other Resources

General discussion of Nordic Earth System Modeling hub happens on the Nordic ESM hub zulip, which everyone is welcome to join.

Key Points

  • NorESM ecosystem

  • Software and tools required for contributing

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