Notes for Contributors

If you intend to contribute to the development of HTSeq, these notes will help you to get started.

Source code

The source code is on Github. To check out the repository, use

git clone https://github.com/simon-anders/htseq.git

Languages

HTSeq is mostly written in Python and is compatible with both Python 2.7 and Python 3.4 and above. However, the codebases for Python 2/3 are separate and development happens mainly on the Python 3 branch.

A good part of HTSeq is actually not written in Python but in Cython. In case you don’t know it yet: Cython, a fork from Pyrex, is a kind of Python compiler. You annotate Python code with additional type informations (the lines starting with cdef in the source code). Cython will then transform the Cython source file (with extension pyx) into a C file, which calls the appropriate funnctions of Python’s C API. Without type annotation, this looks and feels the same as normal Python and is not really faster, either. With type annotation, significant performance gains are possible, especially in inner loops.

A small part, namely the StepVector class, is written in C++ and exported with SWIG. (SWIG, the “Simple Wrapper and Interface Generator” is a very useful tool to generate C/C++ code to wrap an existing C/C++ library such that it becomes accessible as a native library within a number of scripting languages.) I am not so happy with this any more (the abstraction panelty of the object-oriented SWIG wrapping turned out to be a bit high) and ultimatively want to rewrite this part.

Build process

HTSeq follows the standard python packaging guidelines and relies on a setup.py script that is simultaneously compatible withPython 2 and 3. To build the code, run:

python setup.py build

and to install:

python setup.py install

If you are not modifying the low-level C/C++/Cython interfaces, you can do without Cython and SWIG. This is how users normally install HTSeq using pip. If you do modify those files, the setup.py has a preprocessing step that calls Cython and/or SWIG if these programs are found. You set the SWIG and CYTHON environment variables to point to your executables if you have special requirements.

To test during development, HTSeq relies on Continuous Integration (CI), at the moment Travis CI is set up.

To build the documentation, Sphinx was used. Just go into the appropriate doc folder and call:

make html

to regenerate the documentation. Docs are stored on readthedocs.

Distributing

To wrap up a package, call:

python setup.py sdist

This makes a directory dists and in there, a tarball with all the source files (Python and C/C++). If you are a maintainer of HTSeq, you can upload this file onto PyPI on the testing server. Then, you should run the Tracis CI tests that try to install HTSeq directly from PyPI (without the source code). If all goes well, you can upload the tar file onto the live PyPI server.

Files

The package contains source files for Python 2 and 3 in separate folders. Within each of those folders, the following files are found:

HTSeq/__init__.py:
The outer face of HTSeq. This file defines the name space of HTSeq and contains the definition of all classes without performance-critical methods. The file imports _HTSeq in its own namespace, so that, for the user, it does not matter whether an object is defined here or in _HTSeq.pyx.
src/HTSeq/_HTSeq.pyx:
The core of HTSeq. All classes with perfomance-critical methods are defined here. For most of it, this file looks as a normal Python file. Only where performance is critical, type annotation has been added. See the Cython manual for details.
src/HTSeq/_HTSeq.pxd:
The “header file” for _HTSeq.pyx. It contains the type annotation for all the fields of the classes defined in _HTSeq.pyx. If a user would want to write her own Cython code, she could use Cython’s cimport directive to import this header file and so make Cython aware of the typed definitions of fields and methods in _HTSeq.pyx, which may improve performance because it allows Cython to kick out all unnecessary type checking.
HTSeq/_HTSeq_internal.py:
There are a few limitation to the standard Python code allowed in Cython files; most importantly, the yield statement is not yet supported. Hence, _HTSeq.pyx imports this file, and whenever a method in _HTSeq.pyx needs a yield, it calls a function which is put in here.
src/step_vector.h:
The C++ step_vector class template. As this is a pure template, there is no step_vector.cc file with definitions. If you want to use a step_vector in a C++ project, this is all you need.
src/StepVector.i:
An input file to SWIG, which produces the Python wrapper around step_vector.h, i.e., the StepVector module containing the StepVector class. Note that this file contains not only SWIG directives but also Python and come C++ code.
src/AutoPyObjPtr.i:
A very small SWIG library that allows SWIG-wrapped C++ container classes to store Python objects in a way that Python’s garbage collector is happy with.
HTSeq/scripts/count.py and HTSeq/scripts/qa.py:
The source code for the stand-alone scripts htseq-count and htseq-qa. They reside in the sub-package HTSeq.scripts, allowing to call the scripts with, e.g., python -m HTSeq.scripts.qa.
scripts/htseq-count and scripts/htseq-qa:
Short stubs to call the scripts from the command line simply as, e.g., htseq-qa.
doc/:
this documentation, in Sphinx reStructuredText format, and a Makefile to drive Sphinx.
test/test.py
Performs all the deoctests in the documentation, using the example data in the example_data directory.

Furthermore, there are these files to support development:

setup.py:
A typical setuptools setup.py file.

Finally, there are these files

VERSION:
a one-line text-fil with the version number. It is read by setup.py, used by build_it to generate the one-line Python file HTSeq/_version.py and also used when building the documentation.
MANIFEST.in:
Brings some files to the attention of setup.py sdist which would otherwise not be included
LICENCE:
The GPL, v3
README.md:
Points the user to the web site.

and these directories

example_files/:
a few example files to be use by the doctests in the documentation.