developing.md

Developing DuMux

Communicate with DuMux Developers

Issues and Bug Tracking

The bug-tracking system via GitLab Issues offers the possibility to report bugs, discuss new development requests, or ask questions. Feel free to register (if you don't have an account yet) and to contribute by opening an issue.

Commits, Merges requests

To be up-to-date with the latest changes made to any git-repository, you can use RSS Feeds. Simply navigate to Issues or Activity and hit the RSS subscribe button on the top right.

Automatic Testing

The automatic testing using Gitlab-CI helps to constantly check the DuMux problems for compiling and running correctly. An overview over recently run pipelines is available on GitLab. Gitlab-CI is configured via the .gitlab-ci.yml file in the project root directory.

Mailing List

If you have questions, specific problems (which you really struggle to solve on your own), or hints for the DuMux-developers, please contact the mailing list dumux@iws.uni-stuttgart.de. You can subscribe to the mailing list to be informed about upcoming releases, events, and see other peoples questions and answers.

Coding Guidelines

Writing code in a readable manner is very important, especially for future code developers (e.g. for adding features, debugging, etc.). Therefore, we have a contribution guide iuncluding a style guide and tips on how to contribute effectively.

Various tips and tricks

In the following, we mention a couple of tips & tricks. There is also a small Wiki containing more.

Optimized computation vs debugging

Dune and DuMux are built with the help of dunecontrol. Per default, DuMux is compiled using optimization options, which leads to faster runtimes but is unsuitable for debugging. For debug opts you can set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to Debug or RelWithDebInfo in your options file. You can also do this in any of the CMakeLists.txt in DuMux by adding the line

set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Debug)

Afterwards rerun cmake <path-to-build-dir>.

Dunecontrol for selected modules

A complete build using dunecontrol takes some time. In many cases not all modules need to be re-built. Pass the flag --only=dumux to dunecontrol for configuring or building only DuMux. A more complex example would be a case in which you have to configure and build only e.g. dune-grid and DuMux. This is achieved by adding --only=dune-grid,dumux.

Using Dune Debug Streams

Dune provides a helpful feature for keeping your debug-output organized. It uses simple streams like std::cout, but they can be switched on and off for the whole project. You can choose five different levels of severity:

5 - grave (dgrave)
4 - warning (dwarn)
3 - info (dinfo)
2 - verbose (dverb)
1 - very verbose (dvverb)

They are used as shown in the following example

#include <dune/common/stdstreams.hh>
// define the minimal debug level somewhere in your code
#define DUNE_MINIMAL_DEBUG_LEVEL 4
Dune::dgrave << "message"; // will be printed
Dune::dwarn << "message"; // will be printed
Dune::dinfo << "message"; // will NOT be printed

Make headercheck

When developing C++ it is important to always include what you use and not to rely on transitive includes. To check one header file for all necessary includes to compile the contained code, use make headercheck. Include the option -DENABLE_HEADERCHECK=1 in your opts file and run dunecontrol. Then go to the top level in your build-directory and type make headercheck to check all headers or use bash auto-completion to find the target to build.