Contributing to taxastand

This outlines how to propose a change to taxastand.

By participating in this project you agree to abide by its Contributor Code of Conduct.

Scope

taxastand matches and standardizes taxonomic names against a user-supplied reference taxonomy (see the README for details). Feature requests that are really about a specific taxonomic database or web service are likely a better fit for packages like taxize or taxadb; if you’re not sure, open an issue to discuss before starting work.

Filing an issue

If you’ve found a bug, please file an issue that illustrates it with a minimal reproducible example. If you’d like to propose a new feature, open an issue describing what you’d like to see and why, before writing code — this saves everyone time if it turns out the feature is out of scope or needs a different approach.

Pull requests

To contribute a change:

  1. Fork the repo and create a new branch from main.
  2. Make your change.
  3. If you’ve changed code, add or update tests as needed.
  4. Update documentation if you’ve changed function behavior or arguments (run devtools::document() to regenerate .Rd files after editing roxygen comments).
  5. Make sure the package passes checks locally before opening a PR (see below).
  6. Push your branch and open a pull request describing the change.

For small fixes (typos, obvious bugs), feel free to skip the issue and go straight to a pull request.

Running checks locally

# Install development dependencies
devtools::install_dev_deps()

# Run the test suite
devtools::test()

# Check code style (uses the .lintr config in this repo)
lintr::lint_package()

# Auto-format code to match the project's style
styler::style_pkg()

# Full package check (mirrors CI)
devtools::check()

Code style

Code is formatted with styler and linted with lintr (see .lintr for the active rules). Please run both before opening a PR.

Documentation infrastructure

Function documentation is written as roxygen2 comments above each function in R/, not edited directly in man/. Run devtools::document() to regenerate .Rd files and NAMESPACE after changing roxygen comments.

Package lifecycle

taxastand is under active development. Its public API (ts_parse_names(), ts_match_names(), ts_resolve_names()) is considered stable; internal functions may change without notice.

Acknowledging contributions

Contributors who make a substantial code contribution will be credited in DESCRIPTION (Authors@R, role ctb) and NEWS.md.