Contributing code or documentationΒΆ

marx is developed by the MIT/CXC group and made available under the GPL v2 license in source code form. The latest release can be found at distribution.

The developers use the git version control system and host the code on github. We welcome pull requests through github for all apects of the marx software, which includes the following repositories:

  • https://github.com/Chandra-MARX/marx : marx source code. Building the source code has only minimal requirements (a C compiler and GNU autotools).

  • https://github.com/Chandra-MARX/doc : This keeps the source code for the documentation. The documentation is written using Sphinx and requires a number of packages to be build:

    • Python, sphinx, matplotlib.

    • marx, CIAO (incl. the CALDB and the ACIS background files), Sherpa, and SAOTrace to run the examples and generate the associated figures. The examples expect all marx binaries and trace-nest (from SAOTrace) to be in the system path. They also expect the PFILES environment variable to point to the marx parameter files.

    • Longer running tests are in the tests/ subdirectory. These are written as Jupyter notebooks and additionally require astropy, myst_nb (for chaching and building the notebooks with sphinx). The notebooks also need marx and SAOTrace. If they are not on the system path, they can be specified in a marx_examples.cfg files in the tests/ directory.

  • https://github.com/Chandra-MARX/marx-test : This repository focusses on CI-like tests that have additional requirements beyond the basic marx build (if it only needs marx and some shell script, it should to into marx itself). For example, some tests need CIAO, or additional Python packages.