Best Practices for Development Of A New Branch

1.)  When making a change create a branch off main branch.  Release of new packages is done off main branch when ready to do so.

2.)  You will need to make sure the new branch is set to "active" at readthedocs.org after the first push to the new branch, so you can trigger builds manually.  If you want to enable CI on your development branch, edit the ci_workflows.yml file in the .github folder to include the name of the branch under "push".

3.)  Update the version number in the __init__.py under spect_plots/.  This version is imported by all other modules, so it defines the version of the software throughout the repo.

4.)  When doing git commits, refer to github Issue numbers when they are fixed in the commit notes so that github will assign this commit to that Issue, e.g., "- Fixes #44".

5.)  Before releasing a version from main branch, update the History.rst file in the main directory with a summary of the changes.

6.)  Re-build the EGG and WHEEL distributions using the "build_package.sh" script at the top level.

7.)  Keep the various documentation files (mostly located inside the "docs" folder) as up-to-date as possible before final commit to the branch.

8.)  To upload to PyPI with twine: twine upload dist/spec_plots-<version>* -u __token__

9.)  After uploading to PyPI, you can build the conda package.  Inside the "conda" folder in the top-level directory, run "conda skeleton pypi spec-plots" (if you want to remake the "meta.yaml" file from scratch, but first make sure you save a copy of the "conda_build_config.yaml"), then "conda build spec-plots" (one level above the meta.yaml file's location).  NOTE: lately the "conda skeleton" command hasn't run successfully, so lately the process has been to edit the "meta.yaml" file directly, including the URL and checksum hash for the PyPI version you are building.

12.)  Now you can convert the build file to other platforms.  E.g., "conda convert -f --platform linux-64 <name of .tar.bz2>".  Note that you'll need to locate where the conda build package was output and run it there.  The output of the original build is reported when run when you first create it. Lately, only the osx-arm64 platform is being built.

13.)  Test the build using "conda install --use-local spec-plots".  If everything looks good, upload it to anaconda.org using, e.g., "anaconda upload <conda_dir>/anaconda3/conda-bld/osx-64/spec-plots-1.34.2-py27_0.tar.bz2", where the last part is the name of the built .tar.bz2 file.

