1. Developer’s Guide

This guide is intended to ease the development of additional frontends, backends, or other components to the polar2grid package. Polar2Grid has gone through a major redesign process and it is much easier to modify existing components and create new components. However, due to some collaboration with the PyTroll team a majority (if not all) of the python functionality provided by Polar2Grid will be absorbed by the PyTroll package “mpop” in a future version. Polar2Grid will continue to provide the same interface, but with more advanced features. Since this refactoring is currently in progress, any documentation on modifying source code for Polar2Grid has been removed from the Developer’s Guide.

If you would like to contribute to either Polar2Grid or MPOP or have any questions about the collaboration please contact the CSPP/Polar2Grid team.

Code repository: https://github.com/davidh-ssec/polar2grid

Developer’s Guide Components:

1.1. Prerequisites

These polar2grid topics should be understood to get the most out of this guide:

  • The general design of Polar2Grid
  • The responsibilities of a frontend
  • The responsibilities of a backend
  • Package hierarchy and dependencies

A developer should be familiar with these concepts to develop a new component for polar2grid:

  • python and numpy programming
  • memory management in terms of how arrays are created/manipulated/copied
  • remapping/regridding satellite imagery swaths (including types of projections)
  • python packaging, specifically distribute (setuptools)
  • git source code management system and the ‘forking’ and ‘pull request’ features of http://github.com

1.2. Branching Model

The branching model used by the Polar2Grid team follows a basic feature-branch -> develop -> master structure. New features still in development should get their own branches. Once these features are complete they are merged into the develop branch. Once all features for a particular release have been tested and are considered “release ready” they are merged into the master branch. If a master merge is for a new minor version a maintenance branch is also created for future bug fixes. This branching model was inspired from the discussion here.