Create a guide for contributing code to augur

[huddlej]

To provide core developers and other contributors with a formal style guide, we could create some minimal documentation about how to contribute source code along the lines of pandas, matplotlib, etc.

At the start, this documentation could include our agreed style conventions like which docstring format to use, exceptions to PEP8, etc.

This documentation could live in CONTRIBUTING.md, initially.

[tsibley]

:+1:

[rneher]

good idea. But we first need to agree among us...

my vote is for numpy docstrings and a number of white space exceptions to PEP8 rules (I think white space in arithmetic expressions should reflect operator precedence, for example).

[tsibley]

I should clarify. I'm :+1: about expressing project preferences on readability, use of descriptive names, expectation of documentation, and other broad code-organization concerns, but :-1: about bikeshedding details like where not to put whitespace, when to use parentheses, how long lines should be, list comprehensions vs. function chains, etc. I think "generally consistent and readable" is more important than "must pass a linter."

[jameshadfield]

Seems like a good idea. I know we added a linter config to augur, but does anyone actually use it?

I'd favor an emphasis on documentation (markdown files in a docs directory), docstrings in the code and an overall description of what constitutes a module and what the interfaces should look like (if one can generalise).