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Contributing

Build Process Code

Tooling

We use UV for managing python versions, and project dependencies. Please install it in your prefered package manager, and then use

uv run build

To run the build process.

We check the validity of python code in the repo using ruff. We use it for both checking and formatting, with ruff check enabled in CI.

To run it in the project using the project config, please use uv run ruff.

Overview Stuff

We try to keep to some design patterns to keep things manageable.

Firstly, each phase as described in the overview should handle a meaningfully different kind of interaction. Each phase should be structured, to the greatest degree possible, as a sequence of steps. We consider that each phase should have a run.py file that exposes a phase_?run function that takes the arguments needed for its phase.

Each run function then calls a sequence of functions that are defined in the other files in the phase* folder. Each other file in the folder should expose one function, with the same name as the file, minus file extension. For example, create_files.py should expose the function create_files. It is a common pattern for the first expose function to generate a list of files or things to act on, and then multithread this using another function.

Each step function should use logger.info at the top of its function to declare what it is doing.

Best Practices

This is a little bit of a messy list of things we have found that are not perhaps entirely obvious.

  • When doing manipulation of stuff, have a look in the lib functions to see if it is already present. If you find a common pattern, perhaps functionise it.
  • In phase 1, only update files using the update_if_changed function. This function will, as expected, take a file path and a string, and only update the file with the string if there is a difference. Not doing this means a file will always be updated, and hence anything depending on it will always be rebuild, even if the file has not actually changed.
  • When fetching things from the internet (avoid if possible), such as dependencies and such during the build, please make sure and cache them in a global cache directory, as provided by fsfe_website_build.globals.CACHE_DIR. This ensures that full builds can be done without internet access, only needing internet for a run with --clean-cache.
  • When generating lists that end up in files, take care that they are stable to prevent unnecessary rebuilding.
  • All steps are largely considered to be synchronous, and must be finished before the next step can start. Therefore, async must unfortunately be avoided. There are some steps where performance benefits could be achieved by allowing the next step to run concurrently, but the design complications make this unattractive.
  • We use a single process pool to multithread with. This gives a small performance benefit over making and deleting pools continuously.
  • All paths are to be handled with pathlib, not as strings.
  • XML code should be generated with LXML instead of string templating. This is to ensure that we generate valid XML every time, and prevents issues with escaping, etc.
  • This codebase is strictly typed using pyright, and all code should be compliant with pyright strict.