M8

M8 is a limited domain Julia package registry. Package registries are used by Julia's package manager [Pkg.jl][pkg] after calling registry add https://github.com/hustf/M8. The registry includes information about packages such as versions, dependencies and compatibility constraints.

The M8 registry is open for everyone to use and provides access to a curated ecosystem of packages specialized on physics, mechanical engineering and documentation.

You can register new packages by making a pull request here.

Registering a package in General

It is highly recommended to use [TagBot][tagbot], which automatically tags a release in your repository after the new release of your package is merged into the registry.

Registered packages in general have an Open Source Initiative approved license, clearly marked via a LICENSE.md, LICENSE, COPYING or similarly named file in the package repository.

Automatic merging of pull requests

The following criteria are applied for all pull requests (regardless if it is a new package or just a new version):

Version number: Should be a standard increment and not skip versions, unless the package is a forked adaption of other packages. This means incrementing the patch/minor/major version with +1 compared to previous (if any) releases. If, for example, 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 are existing versions, valid new versions are 1.0.1, 1.1.1, 1.2.0 and 2.0.0. Invalid new versions include 1.0.2 (skips 1.0.1), 1.3.0 (skips 1.2.0), 3.0.0 (skips 2.0.0) etc.
Dependencies: All dependencies should have [compat] entries that are upper bounded and only include a finite number of breaking releases. For example, the following [compat] entries meet the version guideline:
```
[compat]
PackageA = "1"          # [1.0.0, 2.0.0), has upper bound (good)
PackageB = "0.1, 0.2"   # [0.1.0, 0.3.0), has upper bound (good)
```
The following [compat] entries do NOT meet the guideline, and are vulnerable to breaking changes in dependencies:
```
[compat]
PackageC = ">=3"        # [3.0.0, ∞), no upper bound (bad)
PackageD = ">=0.4, <1"  # [-∞, ∞), no lower bound, no upper bound (very bad)
```
Please note: each [compat] entry must include only a finite number of breaking releases. Therefore, the following [compat] entries do NOT meet the guideline:
```
[compat]
PackageE = "0"          # includes infinitely many breaking 0.x releases of PackageE (bad)
PackageF = "0.2 - 0"    # includes infinitely many breaking 0.x releases of PackageF (bad)
PackageG = "0.2 - 1"    # includes infinitely many breaking 0.x releases of PackageG (bad)
```
See [Pkg's documentation][pkg-compat] for specification of [compat] entries in your Project.toml file.

You may find CompatHelper.jl helpful for maintaining up-to-date [compat] entries.
Package installation: The package should be installable (Pkg.add("PackageName")), and loadable (import PackageName).
License: The package in general should have an OSI-approved software license located in the top-level directory of the package code, e.g. in a file named LICENSE or LICENSE.md.

The following list is applied for new package registrations, in addition to the previous list:

The package name should start with a capital letter, contain only ASCII alphanumeric characters, contain a lowercase letter, be at least 5 characters long, and should not start with "Ju" or contain the string "julia".
To prevent confusion between similarly named packages, the names of new packages must also satisfy three checks:
- the Damerau–Levenshtein distance between the package name and the name of any existing package must be at least 3.
- the Damerau–Levenshtein distance between the lowercased version of a package name and the lowercased version of the name of any existing package must be at least 2.
- and a visual distance from VisualStringDistances.jl between the package name and any existing package must exceeds a certain a hand-chosen threshold (currently 2.5).