Contribute Python/R code#

If you are a experienced programmer, you might want to help new features development or bug fixing for the abess library. The preferred workflow for contributing code to abess is to fork the master repository on GitHub, clone, and develop on a branch:

  1. Before contributing, you should always open an issue and make sure someone from the abess team agrees that your work is really contributive, and is happy with your proposal. We don’t want you to spend a bunch of time on something that we are working on or we don’t think is a good idea;

  2. Fork the master repository by clicking on the “Fork” button on the top right of the page, which would create a copy to your own GitHub account. If you have forked abess repository, enter it and click "Fetch upsteam", followed by "Fetch and merge" to ensure the code is the latest one;

  3. Clone your fork of abess to the local by Git;

    $ git clone https://github.com/your_account_name/abess.git
$ cd abess

  4. Create a new branch, e.g. named my_branch, to hold your development changes:

    $ git branch my_branch
$ git checkout my_branch

    It is preferred to work on your own branch instead of the master one;

  5. While developing code, make sure to read the abess style guide (PEP8 for Python, tidyverse for R) which will make sure that your new code and documentation matches the existing style. This makes the review process much smoother. For more details about code developing, read the Code Developing description for abess library;

  6. After finishing the development and making sure it works well, you can push them onto your repository:

    $ git add changed_files
$ git commit -m "some commits"
$ git push

  7. Look back to GItHub, merge your branch with the master branch that have the up-to-date codes in abess; and click the “Contribute” button on your fork to open pull request. Now, we can receive your contribution.