Contributing to development

Finesse is an open source program where contributions (of any size) from members of the optical simulation community are welcome and encouraged. This page contains information on how to contribute, either with bug reports or feature requests or with direct development.

The preferred way to contribute to Finesse development is to fork the main repository https://gitlab.com/ifosim/finesse/finesse3, work on this copy of the code then submit a “merge request”.

A brief summary of the process is given below, with more details to be found in the sections later on.

1. Set up the Finesse development environment.

2. Create a new branch on your local copy to hold the changes you want to contribute:

   git checkout -b <feature-name> origin/develop
   

   The name format should follow either feature/xyz or fix/xyz where xyz is an informative branch slug, otherwise the branch might be rejected when pushed.

   Once you have reached this stage you can start programming!

3. Work on your branch, on your machine, using git to do the version control. Push any changes you have committed to your copy of the Finesse repository:

   git push -u origin <feature-name>
   

4. Once you are happy with the state of your changes, submit a merge request for review.