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Welcome

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md

We’re glad you’re thinking about contributing to this open source project of the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Montain Research Station. If you’re unsure about anything, just ask – or submit an issue or pull request anyway. The worst that can happen is you’ll be politely asked to change something. We welcome all friendly contributions.

Policies

We want to ensure a welcoming environment for all of our projects. Our staff follow the General Services Administration (GSA)’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) Code of Conduct and all contributors should do the same.

Public domain

This project is released under MIT license. Portions of the project are in the public domain within the United States, with copyright and related rights waived worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication. See file inst/COPYRIGHTS for details.

Development practices

EditorConfig is in use in the development environment and a .editorconfig file is included in the repository. This will automatically tell popular code editors about the basic style settings like indentation, whitespaces and end-of-line markers for distinguished types of plain text files.

lintr is in use in the development environment for static analysis of R code, and a .lintr file is included in the repository.

Cpplint is in use in the development environment for C++ code style checking. A VSCode plugin is available.

cppcheck is also used for static analysis of C++ code. It can be installed with various package managers, e.g., sudo apt-get install cppcheck on Debian/Ubuntu. Documentation, source code and a Windows installer are available on the cppcheck website.

All new functionality must include tests added to the automated test suite under tests/testthat/. Documentation for testthat is available at https://testthat.r-lib.org/.

Dynamic analysis of C++ code using Valgrind and Clang Address Sanitizer is done regularly during development, and before any new version release. These analyses are performed in GitHub Actions using the workflows provided by rhub.