Introduction

So you want to contribute to gamma-cat?

Really? Are you sure?

Great! Read on …

There are many ways to contribute to gamma-cat. We need more people that help with data entry, review data in gamma-cat for completeness and accuracy, improve the documentation, the data format schemas and the Python scripts.

We will try to describe and explain how everything works here in the contributor documentation. But we realise that in the end we will probably fall short, and if you try to contribute you will have questions about YAML or ECSV or schemas or get stuck with a git on Python question. If that happens, please don’t give up, but contact us and we will help!

Everything happens on Github here: https://www.github.com/gammapy/gamma-cat

This is a git repository that contains everything related to gamma-cat: the data entry in the input folder, the script make.py and gammacat folder with the Python scripts to generate the output files, which are in the output folder. The documentation at https://gamma-cat.readthedocs.io is generated from the RST files in the webpage folder in that repo. But not just all the files and version control is there, Github is also the place to file “issues” for question, discussion, feature or data entry requests, bug reports (see https://github.com/gammapy/gamma-cat/issues). And it is also the place where all changes and additions happen, via “pull requests” (see https://github.com/gammapy/gamma-cat/pulls ).

So if you want to contribute to gamma-cat, you have to make an account on Github. It’s free and should just take a minute. You can then find a lot of information about git and Github here: https://help.github.com/

There you will find documentation how to open “issues” and “pull requests” and resources how to learn git, as well as how to do basic things like edit or add a file directly via the Github web interface. This means that you can do some data entry or documentation improvements for gamma-cat in a simple way. If you’re new to Github and git, and the explanations below aren’t clear to you, then what you can do is to open a new issue in the gamma-cat issue tracker where you describe what you want to do (i.e. add or change something), and then we’ll try to help you do it, i.e. make your first pull request.

The following pages give you more information, focusing mostly on how to do data entry for gamma-cat, since this will be the most common way for people to contribute.