We love your input! We want to make contributing to this project as easy and transparent as possible, whether it's:
- Reporting a bug
- Discussing the current state of the code
- Submitting a fix
- Proposing new features
- Becoming a maintainer
We use GitHub to host code, to track issues and feature requests, as well as accept Pull Requests.
Report bugs using Github's issues
We use GitHub issues to track public bugs.
If you find bugs, mistakes, inconsistencies in this project's code or documents, please let us know by opening a new issue, but consider searching through existing issues first to check and see if the problem has already been reported. If it has, it never hurts to add a quick "+1" or "I have this problem too". This helps prioritize the most common problems and requests.
This is an example of a good bug report by @briandk. Here's another example from craig.hockenberry.
Great Bug Reports tend to have:
- A quick summary and/or background
- Steps to reproduce
- Be specific!
- Give sample code if you can. The stackoverflow bug report includes sample code that anyone with a base R setup can run to reproduce what I was seeing
- What you expected would happen
- What actually happens
- Notes (possibly including why you think this might be happening, or stuff you tried that didn't work)
People love thorough bug reports. I'm not even kidding.
Simple Pull Requests to fix typos, document, or fix small bugs are always welcome.
We ask that more significant improvements to the project be first proposed before anybody starts to code as an issue or as a draft Pull Request (GitHub has a nice new feature for simple Pull Requests called Draft Pull Requests. This gives other contributors a chance to point you in the right direction, give feedback on the design, and maybe point out if related work is already under way.
We Use Github Flow, So All Code Changes Happen Through Pull Requests
Pull Requests are the best way to propose changes to the codebase (we use Github Flow). We actively welcome your Pull Requests:
- Fork the repo and create your branch from
master
. - If you've added code that should be tested, add tests.
- If you've changed APIs, update the documentation.
- Ensure the test suite passes.
- Make sure your code lints.
- Issue that Pull Request!
In short, when you submit code changes, your submissions are understood will be available under the same BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License that covers the project. We also ask all code contributors to GPG sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA.md) to protect future users of this project. Feel free to contact the maintainers if that's a concern.
- We indent using two spaces (soft tabs)
- We ALWAYS put spaces after list items and method parameters ([1, 2, 3], not [1,2,3]), around operators (x += 1, not x+=1), and around hash arrows.
- This is open source software. Consider the people who will read your code, and make it look nice for them. It's sort of like driving a car: Perhaps you love doing donuts when you're alone, but with passengers the goal is to make the ride as smooth as possible.
Portions of this CONTRIBUTING.md document were adopted from best practices of a number of open source projects, including: