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Heather Turner edited this page Dec 4, 2024 · 3 revisions

Existing Resources Relevant to Contributing to R

This is a collection of resources on contributing to R that may be useful for reference when writing related content in the R Development Guide. Some of these are useful for contributors to refer to directly and they are cited directly in the guide. Others are outdated or take a different approach to what we would recommend to new contributors, so we do not cite them directly but store them here for reference.

Development Life cycle

Contributing

  • Contributing to GNU R: A guide by Lionel Henry on contributing to R, that uses Winston Chang’s git mirror of the R sources and is written from the perspective of a macOS user.

Testing

Bug Reporting/Review

  • Bug Reporting: the guide on the R Project webpage on what to do when you find a bug in R. This formed the basis of the Reporting Bugs chapter.
  • R can use your help reviewing bug reports: a post from R Core about how contributors can help with bug review. This formed the basis of the Reviewing Bugs chapter.
  • Bugzilla mirror on GitHub: a mirror of bug reports on R's bug tracker. This is no longer updated and does not include th full bug information.
  • Guides to finding the R or C code that does the main work of a function
    • Access R Source: a guide by Jenny Bryan. It covers R functions; S3 generics and methods, and functions calling compiled code.
    • lookup package: a GitHub package by Jim Hester. Covers functions calling compiled code, as well as S3 and S4 generics and methods.