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Contributing

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md

Verification gate (local pre-push hook)

The GitHub-hosted CI workflows (Verify = lint + spelling + R CMD check, and news-version = NEWS/DESCRIPTION consistency) run on every push to main and every pull request.

The same checks also run locally, as a committed pre-push hook in .githooks/pre-push, so a red result costs seconds instead of a round trip through Actions. It runs four checks, cheapest first:

  1. top NEWS.md heading matches DESCRIPTION Version: (or is (development version))
  2. lintr::lint_package() reports no lints
  3. spelling::spell_check_package() reports no misspellings against DESCRIPTION Language: en-US
  4. R CMD check --as-cran — fails on errors AND warnings (the package is warning-clean; the only allowed NOTE is the CRAN-incoming dev-version / Remotes one)

Enable it once per clone:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

It blocks a push that would turn the lint / news-version / check workflows red. Emergency bypass: SKIP_VERIFY=1 git push (skips all four); SKIP_RCMDCHECK=1 git push (skips only step 4); SKIP_SPELLING=1 git push (skips only step 3).

Spelling (step 3)

Spelling is gated because prose regressed silently once already: the case-study vignette introduced two en-GB spellings and two untracked terms after inst/WORDLIST was built, and nothing caught them (PAGE-xevimisi). Fix genuine misspellings in the text; add real terms to inst/WORDLIST (spelling::update_wordlist() refreshes it). When spelling is not installed the step is skipped with a warning, so clones predating its addition to Suggests are not broken.

Step 4 needs the Suggests toolchain

R CMD check (step 4) requires the full Suggests set (covr, goodpractice, DT, visNetwork, rcmdcheck, …). When rcmdcheck is not installed, step 4 is skipped with a warning rather than failing, so a fresh clone still gets the light gate (steps 1-3). Install the Suggests to arm the full check — it is what catches correctness regressions such as a dependency bump that turns test fixtures red (this class of failure previously slipped onto main while remote CI was billing-disabled; see PR #50).

The cross-platform matrix (full-check.yml) and R-hub (rhub.yaml) remain the “remote testing when submitting to CRAN” path — they run on demand / at release-tag time, because that matrix is slow, not because it is expensive (this repo is public, so GitHub-hosted runners are free).