Contributing to DroneKit-LA

This article provides a high level overview of how to contribute changes to the DroneKit-LA source code.

Tip

We highly recommend that changes and ideas are discussed with the project team before starting work!

Submitting changes

Contributors should create a sensibly name branch in the main dronekit/dronekit-la/ repository and contribute changes back to the project master branch using pull requests:

  • Changes should be tested locally before submission.

  • Changes should be documented (we will provide subediting support!)

  • Changes should not break compatibility of the tool or tool output without prior discussion. So for example to rename a field you should add a new field of the same name, and arrange deprecation of the old field at a future time.

  • Pull requests should be as small and focused as possible to make them easier to review.

  • Pull requests should be rebased against the main project before submission to make integration easier.

Building the Tool

DroneKit-LA is built in the same way on all platforms; by cloning the repository and then calling make in its root directory. The only differences are in the dependencies required to build on each platform.

Building using Vagrant

Building DroneKit-LA in Vagrant explains how to build both the tool and its documentation in a Vagrant VM.

Building on Linux

If you want to run natively on Linux you can manually install the dependencies listed in the Vagrantfile. At time of writing the commands to do so on Linux would be:

# These are needed to build DroneKit-LA
sudo apt-get install git build-essential libjsoncpp-dev libjsoncpp0

# These are needed to build the documentation using Sphinx
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip
sudo easy_install -U pip
sudo pip install sphinx sphinx-3dr-theme

To build dronekit-la, you can then just clone the repository and call make from its root:

# Get the repo
git clone https://github.com/dronekit/dronekit-la.git
cd dronekit-la
git sumodule init
git submodule update

# Build the tool
make

Building on Mac OSX

First install the XCode Developer Tools.

To build dronekit-la, you can then just clone the repository and call make from its root:

# Get the repo
git clone https://github.com/dronekit/dronekit-la.git
git sumodule init
git submodule update
cd dronekit-la

# Build the tool
make

Building on Windows

You can build dronekit-la natively on Windows from within Cygwin.

First set up the dependencies:

  • Download and install Cygwin (install for all users)

  • Install the following packages:

    • Devel / git

    • Devel / make

    • Devel / mingw64-x86_64-gcc-g++

  • Open the Cygwin Terminal

To build dronekit-la, you can then just clone the repository and call make from its root:

# Get the repo
git clone https://github.com/dronekit/dronekit-la.git
cd dronekit-la
git sumodule init
git submodule update

# Build the tool
make

Testing changes

Tests should be used to validate new and changed functionality.

The “standard” test process is run the updated tool against the standard set of logs (in dronekit-la-testdata) and verify that the changes improve the output.

Changes that are specifically designed for a particular vehicle type (e.g. Copter) or frame should be tested against logs for that vehicle. You should also validate that platform-specific tests are not run against the other platforms.

Warning

DroneKit-LA is used by a number of other downstream tools/projects. Updates should not remove tool arguments or remove/change the names of output fields without prior discussion.