Community Guidelines

As an open-source code licensed under the MIT license, you are free to download and modify EISPAC (see the license file for the technical details).

We welcome any and all community feedback and contributions. There are a few ways you can get involved.

User Support

The fastest way to get help with EISPAC is to either email a member of the NRL EISPAC team or, preferably, open an issue on GitHub.

A non-exhaustive list of possible issue topics:

  • General help using the software

  • Reporting a bug

  • Suggesting new features

  • Requesting additional details not covered in the documentation

  • Proposing updates or extensions to the documentation

Contributing to the Code

Know your way around git / GitHub and want to directly help with the code? Great! Please feel free to fork the repository on GitHub. Before you start coding, please take a look at the currently open issues and consider addressing one that fits your skills and interests. If, instead, there is a bug or feature that you would like to work on that does not have an open issue, open a new issue first to let us know what you are working on. Later, once you have made your patch or extension to EISPAC, open an Pull Request on GitHub and we will begin the review process.

A few things to keep in mind:

  • Please test your code before opening a pull request and confirm that it gives the expected result / fixes the target issue. If you add a new function or feature, consider adding a test function (this is not strictly necessary, we can help write unit and integration tests if you are unfamiliar with the process).

  • Please appropriately comment and document your code. We try to use the numpydoc style for docstrings and follow the common Python coding standards as described by PEP8.

  • The primary purpose of EISPAC is to provide tools for downloading, reading, and fitting EIS observations and support analysis done in conjunction with other solar and heliospheric packages (e.g. SunPy, NDCube, and AstroPy). As such, some advanced features may be out-of-scope for EISPAC itself. These topics, however, are still important! So please contact us (via either email or opening an issue) and we can help determine where your idea fits best.