music21

When and how to bump music21's version number. Use this whenever a change warrants a new version — especially any change to a parsing format or parser (musicxml, abc, MIDI, noteworthy/NWC, humdrum, etc.), since those invalidate the pickled-stream cache — as well as new features and bug fixes. Covers which digit to change, the even/odd minor and beta-suffix conventions, the TWO files to edit, and the `Changed in`/`New in` docstring markers.

How to correctly run music21's tests and doctests with pytest. Use this whenever you need to run, verify, or judge the pass/fail of tests or doctests in this repo — confirming a change works, checking that doctests still pass, running a single module's tests, or sanity-checking before a PR or push. Especially consult this before concluding that a doctest "fails": the repo's pytest plugin normalizes object addresses and injects the doctest namespace, and running doctests any other way (e.g. raw doctest.testmod) produces FALSE failures.