Submitting patches

  • Always make a new branch for your work.
  • Patches should be small to facilitate easier review. Studies have shown that review quality falls off as patch size grows. Sometimes this will result in many small PRs to land a single large feature.
  • Larger changes should be discussed in a ticket before submission.
  • New features and significant bug fixes should be documented in the Change log.

If you believe you’ve identified a security issue in Sessions, please follow the directions on the security page.

Code

When in doubt, refer to PEP 8 for Python code. You can check if your code meets our automated requirements by running flake8 against it. If you’ve installed the development requirements this will automatically use our configuration. You can also run the tox job with tox -e pep8.

Write comments as complete sentences.

Every code file must start with the boilerplate notice of the Apache License. Additionally, every Python code file must contain

from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function

Tests

All code changes must be accompanied by unit tests with 100% code coverage (as measured by the combined metrics across our build matrix).

Documentation

All features should be documented with prose in the docs section.

When referring to a hypothetical individual (such as “a person receiving an encrypted message”) use gender neutral pronouns (they/them/their).

Docstrings are typically only used when writing abstract classes, but should be written like this if required:

def some_function(some_arg):
    """
    Does some things.

    :param some_arg: Some argument.
    """

So, specifically:

  • Always use three double quotes.
  • Put the three double quotes on their own line.
  • No blank line at the end.
  • Use Sphinx parameter/attribute documentation syntax.