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Contributing guidelines

We welcome any kind of contribution to our software, from simple comment or question to a full fledged pull request. Please read and follow our Code of Conduct.

A contribution can be one of the following cases:

  1. you have a question;
  2. you think you may have found a bug (including unexpected behavior);
  3. you want to make some kind of change to the code base (e.g. to fix a bug, to add a new feature, to update documentation);
  4. you want to make a new release of the code base.

The sections below outline the steps in each case.

Questions

  1. use the search functionality here to see if someone already experienced the same issue;
  2. if your search did not yield any relevant results, start a new conversation.

Bugs

  1. use the search functionality here to see if someone already filed the same issue;
  2. if your issue search did not yield any relevant results, make a new issue, and choose the Bug report type. This includes a checklist to make sure you provide enough information to the rest of the community to understand the cause and context of the problem.

Changes or additions

  1. (important) announce your plan to the rest of the community before you start working. This announcement should be in the form of a (new) issue. Choose the Feature request type, which includes a checklist of things to consider to get the discussion going;
  2. (important) wait until some kind of consensus is reached about your idea being a good idea;
  3. if needed, fork the repository to your own Github profile and create your own feature branch off of the latest master commit. While working on your feature branch, make sure to stay up to date with the master branch by pulling in changes, possibly from the 'upstream' repository (follow the instructions here and here);
  4. make sure the existing tests still work by running the test suite from RStudio;
  5. add your own tests (if necessary);
  6. update or expand the documentation, see package documentation guidelines;
  7. make sure the release notes in inst/NEWS.Rd are updated;
  8. add your name to the contributors lists in the DESCRIPTION file;
  9. push your feature branch to (your fork of) the GGIR repository on GitHub;
  10. create the pull request, e.g. following the instructions here. The pull request template includes a checklist with the above items.

In case you feel like you've made a valuable contribution, but you don't know how to write or run tests for it, or how to generate the documentation: don't let this discourage you from making the pull request; we can help you! Just go ahead and submit the pull request, but keep in mind that you might be asked to append additional commits to your pull request.

Coding style

We loosely follow the tidyverse style guide, but do not enforce every rule strictly. For instance, we prefer = instead of <- as the default assignment operator. When in doubt about what style to use, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Some general guidelines that we try to adhere to:

  • Use standard R as much as possible, keep dependencies to a minimum.
  • Keep loops to a minimum.
  • Don't make lines too long.

If you are a first time contributor, don't worry about coding style too much. We will help you get things in shape.

Package documentation

We currently have three sources for documenting the package:

  • The reference manual, including package basic information and the functions documentation files.
  • The package vignettes.
  • The github.io website (built with the pkgdown package).

Reference manual

The reference manual gets the information from the .Rd documents within the man folder in the package repository. Therefore, updating the information in those files will automatically update the reference manual. Note that most of the GGIR functions are not intended for direct interaction with the user, as such, the documentation of most arguments is centralized in the details section of man/GGIR.Rd. If you for example want to add an extra parameter to params_247 then this should be documented there. Further, you should not forget to include the new argument in functions \link{load_params} and \link{check_params}.

Package vignettes

The folder vignettes in the GGIR repository contains the .Rmd files. The .Rmd files that do not start with the word 'chapter' are used for the traditional package vignettes as hosted by CRAN. Use these files to edit an existing vignette, or use the structure of any of the vignettes to build up a new one. All .Rmd files which name starts with the word 'chapter' are ignored. These chapter-vignettes are used only for the github.io website (see next section).

To create a new vignette for CRAN

To create a new package vignette for CRAN, please use usethis::use_vignette() and make sure the name of the vignette file does not start by "chapter". For example, if you want to create a new vignette on sleep for CRAN, you may do the following:

usethis::use_vignette(name = "sleep", 
                      title = "How to analyse your sleep data in GGIR")

This would create a new "sleep.Rmd" file within the vignettes folder in the GGIR repository. Then you can edit this file to build up the vignette.

To remove a vignette from CRAN

There are two ways to remove a vignette from CRAN:

  1. Removing the Rmd file corresponding to the vignette in the vignettes folder, note that the file and the information will be lost.
  2. Adding the path to the vignette in the .Rbuildignore file available in the GGIR repository. For example, to remove the GGIRParameters vignette from CRAN, you can add:
^vignettes/GGIRParameters.Rmd

github.io website

For updating or adding information to the github.io website, we need to use the pkgdown configuration file that can be found in the repositories root directory, as well as with the chapter vignettes discussed above.

To edit information in an existing chapter

  1. Open the vignette corresponding to the chapter you wish to edit (see the _pkgdown.yml) file for the chapter and its vignette path (href).
  2. Make your changes in the vignette.
  3. Run the pkgdown::build_site() function.

To add a new chapter

  1. Create a Rmd file for the vignette via usethis::use_vignette() and make sure the name of the vignette starts by "chapter", for example:
usethis::use_vignette(name = "chapterSleep", 
                      title = "10. How to analyse your sleep data in GGIR")
  1. Open the _pkgdown.yml file and fill up the name and reference of the new chapter under menu. Make sure to follow the coding and structure of the rest of chapters.
  2. Run the pkgdown::build_site() function.

To remove a chapter

  1. Remove the lines corresponding to the chapter in the _pkgdown.yml file in line 42 onwards.
  2. Optionally you may remove the Rmd file corresponding to the chapter, but only by doing the step 1, the chapter will not appear in the github.io website.
  3. Run the pkgdown::build_site() function.

To edit the name of a chapter

Chapter names are defined twice, in the _pkgdown.yml file and in the vignette file itself. You need to make sure both titles match as the first will be used in the drop-down list in the github.io website and the other in the specific page for the chapter.

Adding the changes to the master branch

The last step would be committing and pushing your changes to github and making a pull request as with any other contribution to the package. Note that, running the pkgdown::build_site() function will edit the files within the docs folder, and probably add some new files. This only applies when editing information from the github.io website. It is important that these changes to the files in the docs folder are also part of the pull requests, as otherwise the website would not be updated.

New release

GGIR follows the release cycle process described in this document.