NeMo/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributions are welcome!

We do all of NeMo's development in the open. Contributions from NeMo community are welcome.

Pull Requests (PR) Guidelines

Send your PRs to the main branch

1. Make sure your PR does one thing. Have a clear answer to "What does this PR do?".
2. Read General Principles and style guide below
3. Make sure you sign your commits. E.g. use git commit -s when before your commit
4. Make sure all unittests finish successfully before sending PR pytest or (if yor dev box does not have GPU) pytest --cpu from NeMo's root folder
5. Send your PR and request a review

Unit tests

Quick tests (locally, while developing)

pytest
# If you don't have NVIDIA GPU do:
# pytest --cpu

Full tests, including pre-trained model downloads

pytest --with_downloads

Whom should you ask for review:

1. For changes to NeMo's core: @ericharper, @titu1994, @blisc, or @okuchaiev
2. For changes to NeMo's ASR collection: @titu1994, @redoctopus, @jbalam-nv, or @okuchaiev
3. For changes to NeMo's NLP collection: @MaximumEntropy, @ericharper, @ekmb, @yzhang123, @VahidooX, @vladgets, or @okuchaiev
4. For changes to NeMo's TTS collection: @blisc or @stasbel, or @okuchaiev

Note that some people may self-assign to review your PR - in which case, please wait for them to add a review.

Your pull requests must pass all checks and peer-review before they can be merged.

General principles

1. User-oriented: make it easy for end users, even at the cost of writing more code in the background
2. Robust: make it hard for users to make mistakes.
3. Well-tested: please add simple, fast unittests. Consider adding CI tests for end-to-end functionality.
4. Reusable: for every piece of code, think about how it can be reused in the future and make it easy to be reused.
5. Readable: code should be easier to read.
6. Legal: if you copy even one line of code from the Internet, make sure that the code allows the license that NeMo supports. Give credit and link back to the code.
7. Sensible: code should make sense. If you think a piece of code might be confusing, write comments.

Python style

We use black as our style guide. To check whether your code will pass style check (from the NeMo's repo folder) run: python setup.py style and if it does not pass run python setup.py style --fix.

1. Include docstrings for every class and method exposed to the user.
2. Use Python 3 type hints for every class and method exposed to the user.
3. Avoid wild import: from X import * unless in X.py, __all__ is defined.
4. Minimize the use of **kwargs.
5. RaiseError is preferred to assert. Write: if X: raise Error instead of assert X.
6. Classes are preferred to standalone methods.
7. Methods should be atomic. A method shouldn't be longer than 75 lines, e.g. can be fit into the computer screen without scrolling.
8. If a method has arguments that don't fit into one line, each argument should be in its own line for readability.
9. Add __init__.py for every folder.
10. F-strings are prefered to formatted strings.
11. Loggers are preferred to print. In NeMo, you can use logger from from nemo.utils import logging
12. Private functions (functions start with _) shouldn't be called outside its host file.
13. If a comment lasts multiple lines, use ''' instead of #.

Collections

Collection is a logical grouping of related Neural Modules. It is a grouping of modules that share a domain area or semantics. When contributing module to a collection, please make sure it belongs to that category. If you would like to start a new one and contribute back to the platform, you are very welcome to do so.