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Welcome to git2r!

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributions to the git2r project are welcome and appreciated. Here follow some guidelines and description of the project to make it easier for you to submit pull requests, report issues, and provide feedback.

Licensing

By contributing to git2r, you agree to release your contribution under the terms of the GPL v2 license.

Sign your work

To improve tracking of who did what, we’ve borrowed the “sign-off” procedure from the Linux kernel project - A Developer’s Certificate of Origin. Although git2r is a lot smaller project it is a good discipline to follow it.

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as a open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the below:

Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
    have the right to submit it under the open source license
    indicated in the file; or

(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
    of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
    license and I have the right under that license to submit that
    work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
    by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
    permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
    in the file; or

(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
    person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
    it.

(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
    are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
    personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
    maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
    this project or the open source license(s) involved.

Then you just add a line to every git commit message:

Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <[email protected]>

Using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions).

This line can be automatically added by Git if you configure your user.name and user.email and run the git commit command with the -s option:

git commit -s.

Overall design git2r <- libgit2 + R

Internally the git2r package uses the libgit2 C library to interact with a Git repository. C code can be called from R using the .Call method. However, in order to map the R data structures to the C data structures used by libgit2 an intermediate layer of C code is between the R methods and libgit2, see figure below.

Overall design

R code

The package is based on S4 classes/methods. Each S4 class is prefixed with git_ to have the same name as the corresponding libgit2 data structure. The naming strategy for methods is to use the data structure (branch, note, stash) followed by the action (create, list, remove), e.g. note_create, note_list, and note_remove, etc. However, the naming is not completely consistent in the package, e.g. init instead of repository_init.

Documentation

The package documentation is written with roxygen2 version 4.1.1. All contributed methods and classes must be documented. Moreover, all exported methods should have examples of their usage. Please file an issue if you spot a method in the documentation without an example, or, better yet, a pull request. The recommended way to generate man files from the roxygen documentation is to run the roxygen target in the Makefile

make roxygen

Tests

The tests for the package can be found in the tests folder. All contributions of code should have corresponding tests.

C code

The git2r C code is in files prefixed with git2r_ in the src folder. The libgit2 C code is located in src/libgit2 with dependencies in src/http-parser and src/regex.

Naming

The git2r C functions are named with the prefix git2r_module where module groups related functionality, e.g. git2r_repository_open and git2r_repository_init. The source code for each module is in git2r_module.c and git2r_module.h.

Code layout

  1. Argument checking: All R arguments must be checked prior to their usage. There are several help functions in src/git2r_arg.h to facilitate argument checking. The repo argument is checked in the git2r_repository_open function and returns NULL on failure.

  2. Perform the actual work: The error code (return value) from each call to a libit2 function must be checked. In case of an error, initiate cleanup.

  3. Cleanup: All allocated resources must be freed. In case of an error, call Rf_error with the error message.

Documentation

Document functions and parameters with Doxygen to enable generation of documentatation of the internal git2r C code.

Code style

It’s very important to have a consistent code style, so before submitting, make sure the code matches surrounding code.

Makefile

To facilitate development a Makefile exists in the root folder with targets for several common tasks. For an introduction to make, see e.g. the minimal make tutorial by Karl Broman.

  • roxygen Rebuild R documentation with roxygen2. Checks that the correct version of roxygen2 is installed.

  • check Build package and then run R CMD check to test the package.

  • check_valgrind Build package and then run R CMD check with valgrind to detect possible problems.

  • valgrind Run all test code with valgrind.

  • sync_libgit2 Sync git2r with changes in the libgit2 C-library

    1. Clone or pull libgit2 to parent directory from https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2.git

    2. Run make sync_libgit2. It first removes files and then copy files from libgit2 directory. Next it runs an R script to build Makevars.in and Makevars.win based on source files. To pass R CMD check git2r the printf calls must be changed to use the R printing routine Rprintf. Therefore it runs a patch command to change some lines in the source code to pass R CMD check git2r.

    3. Build and check updated package make check

  • Makevars The code in src is compiled with a Makevars file (Makevars.in and Makevars.win). They are automatically generated from an R script when running this target.

  • configure Generate a configure script from configure.ac with autoconf. The configure script is used on non-Windows platforms to generate a system-dependent configuration and detect e.g. OpenSSL and LibSSH2 before installation.

  • clean Remove temporary and object files.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to open an issue