We see Kwant not just as a package with fixed functionality, but rather as a framework for implementing different physics-related algorithms using a common set of concepts and, if possible, a shared interface. We have designed it leaving room for growth, and plan to keep extending it.
External contributions to Kwant are highly welcome. You can help to advance the project not only by writing code, but also by reporting bugs, and fixing/improving the documentation. A mailing list is available for discussions.
If you have some code that works well with Kwant, or extends it in some useful way, please consider sharing it. Any external contribution will be clearly marked as such, and relevant papers will be added to the list of suggested acknowledgements. The complete development history is also made available through a web interface. If you plan to contribute, it is best to coordinate with us in advance either through the mailing list, or directly by email for matters that you prefer to not discuss publicly.
If you encounter a problem with Kwant, first try to reproduce it with as simple a system as possible. Double-check with the documentation that what you observe is actually a bug in Kwant. If you think it is, please check whether the problem is already known by searching the mailing list.
If the problem is not known yet, please email a bug report to the Kwant mailing list. A report should contain:
We use the version control system Git to coordinate the development of Kwant. If you are new to Git, we invite you to learn its basics. (There’s a plethora of information available on the Web.) Kwant’s Git repository contains not only the source code, but also all of the reference documentation and the tutorial.
It is best to base your work on the latest version of Kwant:
git clone http://git.kwant-project.org/kwant
Then you can modify the code, and build Kwant and the documentation as described in the installation instructions.
Some things to keep in mind:
A useful trick for working on the source code is to build in-place so that there is no need to re-install after each change. This can be done with the following command
python setup.py build_ext -i
The kwant subdirectory of the source distribution will be thus turned into
a proper Python package that can be imported. To be able to import Kwant from
within Python, one can either work in the root directory of the distribution
(where the subdirectory kwant is located), or make a (symbolic) link from
somewhere in the Python search path to the the package subdirectory.