Contributing

Issues

If you find a bug, have a question about how to use a feature that does not have sufficient documentation, or have a suggestion for improvement, please leave an issue at our GitHub repo.

For bug reports please include:

• exDE version
• Operating System
• R version
• Steps to recreate
• Expected behaviour
• Actual behaviour

Git

We use Git on this project. Which means we use main, dev, feat/*, bug/*, and hotfix/* branches. Please refer to this post for more information of each type of branch.

• main: this branch always stores the last “production” release of the software, and is a protected branch. A pull request should not be submitted to main unless it is from dev, meaning that the software version should be updated.
• dev: all pull requests from users should be made to the dev branch. This branch is protected from deletion.
• feat: new and significantly enhanced features are made in feat branches before being merged with dev. After a feat/* branch is merged with dev, it can be deleted.
• bug: these branches fix bugs, usually after being raised as an issue. After a bug/* branch is merged with dev, it can be deleted.
• hotfix: the difference between a bug/* and hotfix/* branch is hotfix is for small quick fixes (misspellings, incorrect arguments, etc.) and are short-lived. After being merged with dev, they can be deleted.

We periodically merge dev into main for release updates. These releases will appear on the GitHub releases page.

Continuous integration

We use GitHub Actions as our continuous integration platform to run workflows. The workflows we use are from r-lib/actions for R packages.

We run three types of workflows.

R CMD check runs during any pull request to [main, dev] branches.

Test coverage runs during pushes to [main] and uses our codecov.io integration for checking test coverage.

Finally, pkgdown runs during pushes to [main].

Please note that sometimes hard to diagnose bugs can be due to out of date workflows. If you find a strange or unusual bug coming from a workflow, this is something to consider checking.

Pull Requests

If making a pull request, please only use dev as the base branch. If you are adding a new feature (i.e. the pull is from a feat/* branch), please ensure you have added minimal tests using testthat so that the functionality of your feature can be tested.