CONTRIBUTING.md
In dfsp-spirit/nitools: Managing and Visualizing Brain Surface Data

I am very happy to accept pull requests, provided you are fine with publishing your work under the license of this project. If your PR is not just a fix but changes or adds lots of code, please get in touch by opening an issue before starting the project so we can discuss it first. Development currently happens on the develop branch.

If you want to contribute something, the general workflow is:

Log into the Github website, visit the fsbrain repo page, and click fork to fork the fsbrain repository to your account.
Checkout your forked repository to your computer. You will be on the master branch. Make sure to switch to the develop branch.
Create a new branch off develop and name it after your feature, e.g., add_cool_new_feature or fix_issue_17.
Make changes to the fsbrain code and commit them into your branch. Repeat as needed.
Make sure the unit tests are all green and that the code passes the R checks. Adding new tests for your code is a great idea, of course.
When you are happy with your changes, create a pull request, requesting to merge your branch into the develop branch of my fsbrain repo.

Most likely you already have your development environment setup the way you prefer it when you decide to contribute. If not, here is a quick way to get started.

Note that you do not have to use rstudio of follow these suggestions, any editor or IDE will do.

Make sure you have a recent R version installed.
Download and install the latest version of rstudio (I use the free RStudio Desktop Open Source Edition).
In your shell, change into your checkout of your fork of fsbrain (see above) and run rstudio fsbrain.Rproj.
Install the required development packages listed on the fsbrain website.
In rstudio, make sure all required development packages are installed and you are ready to go:
Build the package including the documentation (Menu > Build > Build Source Package) and install/load it (Menu > Build > Clean and Rebuild).
Run the unit tests (Menu > Build > Check Package).
Generate the test coverage report (Item bar > Addins > Report test coverage for a package). Wait until the report shows up in the Viewer.
If this completed without errors, you are ready to make your changes in a new branch, as explained above.