CONTRIBUTING.md
In ecohealthalliance/doltr: A client for the dolt database

Contributing to the doltr R package

You want to contribute to doltr? Great!

Please submit questions, bug reports, and requests in the issues tracker. Please submit bug reports with a minimal reprex.

Note that this is a wrapper around both dolt and RMariaDB. Issues may be due to those programs and are likely to be due to interactions between our programs. Bear with us.

If you plan to contribute code, go ahead and fork the repo and submit a pull request. A few notes:

This package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Why? We want contribution to be enjoyable and rewarding for everyone!
If you have large change, please open an issue first to discuss.
I'll generally include contributors as authors in the DESCRIPTION file (with their permission) for most contributions that go beyond small typos in code or documentation.
This package generally uses the rOpenSci packaging guidelines for style and structure.
Documentation is generated by roxygen2. Please write documentation in code files and let it auto-generate documentation files. Documentation should be written in markdown
We aim for testing that has high coverage and is robust. Include tests with any major contribution to code. Test your changes the package with before submitting your change.

Please take a look at the issues tracker for what I'm working on and what you could contribute to.

dolt itself is rapidly developing and doltr will need to track it to keep up with changes.
In general, the goal is for a DBI-compliant interface that wraps RMariaDB with some enhanced features specific to dolt, and a high-level gert-like interface for versioning-related functionality. DBI-compliance via the DBItest package has a ways to go, so help there is welcome.
A number of doltr functions wrap the dolt command-line tool, but in general wherever possible functions that interact with the database should do so via the DBI/SQL route. As more functionality becomes available via the SQL route we will incorporate it.
This is a relatively "heavy" dependency package rather than a minimal DBI interface so as to add convenience functions specific to Dolt and specific to other workflows. If you need a minimal client, {RMariaDB} can be used to interface with Dolt databases and has far fewer dependencies, and other functionality can be achieved via system() calls and the Dolt CLI Interface.
This package is being developed to support internal projects at EcoHealth Alliance. We strive to be good contributors to the open-source ecosystem and for this to be a general-purpose tool, but internal needs will drive prioritization and design decisions.