You’d like to contribute to nose? Great! Now that nose is hosted under Mercurial, contributing is even easier.
Start by getting a local working copy of nose, either stable, from google code:
hg clone http://python-nose.googlecode.com/hg/ nose-stable
or unstable, from bitbucket:
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/jpellerin/nose/ nose-unstable
If you plan to submit changes back to the core repository, you should set up a public repository of your own somewhere. Bitbucket is a good place to do that. Once you’ve set up your bitbucket nose repository, if working from stable, pull from your working copy of nose-stable, and push to bitbucket. That (with occasional merging) will be your normal practice for keeping your repository up to date. If you’re on bitbucket and working from unstable, just fork http://bitbucket.org/jpellerin/nose/.
nose runs its own test suite with tox <http://codespeak.net/tox/>. You don’t have to install tox to run nose’s test suite, but you should, because tox makes it easy to run all tests on all supported python versions. You’ll also need python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.1 and jython installed somewhere in your $PATH.
Join the nose developer list at google groups. It’s low-traffic and mostly signal.
You can find a list of open issues at nose’s google code repository. If you’d like to work on an issue, leave a comment on the issue detailing how you plan to fix it, and where to find the Mercurial repository where you will publish your changes.