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Contributing to pkgstats

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md

First of all, thanks for considering contributing to pkgstats! 👍 It’s people like you that make it rewarding for us - the project maintainers - to work on pkgstats. 😊

pkgstats is an open source project, maintained by people who care.

Code of conduct

Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

How you can contribute

There are several ways you can contribute to this project. If you want to know more about why and how to contribute to open source projects like this one, see this Open Source Guide.

Share the love ❤️

Think pkgstats is useful? Let others discover it, by telling them in person, via Twitter or a blog post.

Using pkgstats for a paper you are writing? Consider citing it.

Ask a question ⁉️

Using pkgstats and got stuck? Browse the documentation to see if you can find a solution. Still stuck? Post your question as an issue on GitHub. While we cannot offer user support, we’ll try to do our best to address it, as questions often lead to better documentation or the discovery of bugs.

Want to ask a question in private? Contact the package maintainer by email.

Propose an idea 💡

Have an idea for a new pkgstats feature? Take a look at the documentation and issues list to see if it isn’t included or suggested yet. If not, suggest your idea as an issue on GitHub. While we can’t promise to implement your idea, it helps to:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.
  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible.

See below if you want to contribute code for your idea as well.

Report a bug 🐛

Using pkgstats and discovered a bug? That’s annoying! Don’t let others have the same experience and report it as an issue on GitHub so we can fix it. A good bug report makes it easier for us to do so, so please:

  • Use the reprex package to create a reproducible example.

  • Include the version of pkgstats with the following line in your reprex code:

    packageVersion("pkgstats")

Improve the documentation 📖

Noticed a typo on the website? Think a function could use a better example? Good documentation makes all the difference, so your help to improve it is very welcome!

The website

This website is generated with pkgdown. That means we don’t have to write any html: content is pulled together from documentation in the code, vignettes, Markdown files, the package DESCRIPTION and _pkgdown.yml settings. If you know your way around pkgdown, you can propose a file change to improve documentation. If not, report an issue and we can point you in the right direction.

Function documentation

Functions are described as comments near their code and translated to documentation using roxygen2. If you want to improve a function description:

  1. Go to R/ directory in the code repository.
  2. Look for the file with the name of the function.
  3. Propose a file change to update the function documentation in the roxygen comments (starting with #').

Contribute code 📝

Care to fix bugs or implement new functionality for pkgstats? Awesome! 👏 Have a look at the issue list and leave a comment on the things you want to work on. See also the development guidelines below.

Development guidelines

We try to follow the GitHub flow for development.

  1. Fork this repo and clone it to your computer. To learn more about this process, see this guide.
  2. If you have forked and cloned the project before and it has been a while since you worked on it, pull changes from the original repo to your clone by using git pull upstream master.
  3. Open the RStudio project file (.Rproj).
  4. Make your changes:
    • Write your code.
    • Test your code (bonus points for adding unit tests).
    • Document your code (see function documentation above).
    • Check your code with devtools::check() and aim for 0 errors and warnings.
  5. Commit and push your changes.
  6. Submit a pull request.

Code style

The pkgstats coding style diverges somewhat from the commonly used tidyverse style guide, primarily through judicious use of whitespace, which aims to improve code readability. Code references in pkgstats are separated by whitespace, just like words of text. Just like it is easier to understand “these three words” than “thesethreewords”, code is formatted like this:

these <- three (words (x))

and not like this:

these <- three(words(x))

The position of brackets is then arbitrary, and we could also write

these <- three( words (x))

pkgstats code opts for the former style, with the natural result that one ends up writing

this <- function ()

with a space between function and (). You can easily (re-)format your code to accord with this style by installing the spaceout package and running:

styler::style_pkg (style = spaceout::spaceout_style)