FiPyGit usage¶
All stages of FiPy development are archived in a Git repository at GitHub. You can browse through the code at https://github.com/usnistgov/fipy and, using a Git client, you can download various tagged revisions of FiPy depending on your needs.
Attention
Be sure to follow Installation to obtain all the prerequisites for FiPy.
Git client¶
A git client application is needed in order to fetch files from our
repository. This is provided on many operating systems (try executing
which git) but needs to be installed on many others. The sources to
build Git, as well as links to various pre-built binaries for
different platforms, can be obtained from http://git-scm.com/.
Git branches¶
In general, most users will not want to download the very latest state of FiPy, as these files are subject to active development and may not behave as desired. Most users will not be interested in particular version numbers either, but instead with the degree of code stability. Different branches are used to indicate different stages of FiPy development. For the most part, we follow a successful Git branching model. You will need to decide on your own risk tolerance when deciding which stage of development to track.
A fresh copy of the FiPy source code can be obtained with:
$ git clone https://github.com/usnistgov/fipy.git
An existing Git checkout of FiPy can be shifted to a different <branch> of development by issuing the command:
$ git checkout <branch>
in the base directory of the working copy. The main branches for FiPy are:
masterdesignates the (ready to) release state of FiPy. This code is stable and should pass all of the tests (or should be documented that it does not).
Past releases of FiPy are tagged as
x.y.zAny released version of FiPy will be designated with a fixed tag: The current version of FiPy is 3.4.5+308.gbf598029e. (Legacy
version-x_y_ztags are retained for historical purposes, but won’t be added to.)
Tagged releases can be found with:
$ git tag --list
Any other branches will not generally be of interest to most users.
Note
For some time now, we have done all significant development work on
branches, only merged back to master when the tests pass
successfully. Although we cannot guarantee that master will never
be broken, you can always check our Continuous Integration status
to find the most recent revision that it is running acceptably.
Historically, we merged to develop before merging to master. We
no longer do this, although for time being, develop is kept
synchronized with master. In a future release, we will remove the
develop branch altogether.
For those who are interested in learning more about Git, a wide variety of online sources are available, starting with the official Git website. The Pro Git book [9] is particularly instructive.