No contributing / developer docs

The README appears to be end user focused and the Wiki is empty, so there doesn’t appear to be any documentation on how to contribute to the project or to hack on the code.

I can figure out some of the dependencies by looking at the Makefile (e.g. pep8, pylint, mypy), but explicit documentation on what developers need to install, what tests should be run before submitting PRs, etc would be useful.

Also, background documentation for things which might not be readily apparent to your garden variety Pythonista such was why it’s a good thing to pretend to do static typing in a dynamically typed language, how to install mypy (since they don’t appear to believe in installation instructions), etc

[FarahZKhan]

Hey @manu-chroma I think details below can help anyone who wants to set up a virtual environment for the development purposes without messing up the original installations done on their systems:

Notes from Code fest:

To work for development purposes, you can install cwltool in a virtual environment:

• Install virtualenv via pip: pip install virtualenv
• Clone the cwltool: git clone https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwltool.git
• Switch to cwltool directory: cd cwltool
• Create a virtual environment: virtualenv cwltool
• To begin using the virtual environment, it needs to be activated: source bin/activate
• To check if you have the virtual environment set up: type type and type python
• Install cwltool in the virtual environment: pip install .
• Check the version which might be different from the version installed in general on any system: cwltool --version

[mr-c]

@manu-chroma Yes, that is an incompletely modified contributing guide inherited from https://github.com/swcarpentry/styles/ – I agree that there should be a common contributing guide maintained in https://github.com/common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language and linked to from each project.