1  Introduction

This guide is a comprehensive resource for contributing to base R1 – for both new and experienced contributors. It is maintained by the R Contribution Working Group. We welcome your contributions to base R!

1.1 Overview of different ways of contributing to the base R Project

Contributions to base R are possible in a number of different ways. Some of them are listed below:

  1. Contributing to bug fixing: Refer to Issue Tracking and Reviewing Bugs.
  2. Contributing to translations: Refer to Translations.
  3. Testing R before release: Refer to Testing Pre-release R Versions.
  4. Contributing to documentation, including this guide: Refer to Documenting R and Contributing to this guide.

1.2 Quick start to the guide

The guide is intended as a comprehensive resource for contributing to base R. The following chapter outline provides an overview with links to sections for getting started with contributing.

  • The Introduction chapter provides an overview of different ways of contributing to the R project, a quick start to the guide, and a section on how to contribute to the guide itself.

  • The R Patched and Development Versions chapter covers instructions on how to install R from source or from binaries and also discusses the tools required to build R.

  • The Issue Tracking chapter covers how contributors can support issue tracking in R, how to get an account on R’s Bugzilla, how to navigate Bugzilla and search for bugs to contribute to.

  • The Reporting Bugs chapter discusses what condition may or may not be a bug and how to report bugs if you find them.

  • The Submitting Feature Requests chapter discusses how to submit feature requests and shares some examples submitted to Bugzilla.

  • The Reviewing Bugs chapter discusses how you can make a contribution to reviewing bug reports.

  • The Finding the Source chapter provides an overview of the R codebase and helps with finding source code of base functions written in R and/or C.

  • The Lifecycle of a Patch chapter discusses how to create a patch to propose a bug fix.

  • The Documenting chapter describes the format and style guide for help files in R, how to report and review issues in the existing documentation, and how to propose changes.

  • The Message Translations chapter covers internationalization in R, i.e., the display of messages in languages other than English.

  • The Testing Pre-release R Versions chapter discusses how you can help with testing of pre-release versions of R.

  • For more information on how to engage with the community and ask for help, refer to the Where to Get Help chapter.

  • To keep up with the developments in R refer to the resources available in the News and Announcements chapter.

  • Tools that may be useful for R developers are available in the Developer Tools chapter.

  • Additional resources for contributing to R are available in the Additional Resources chapter.

  • The R Core Developers chapter contains a list of the former and current members of the R Core Team who have write access to the R source.

1.3 How to contribute to this guide itself?

All contributors should start by reading the contributing page for this project.

Maintainers and contributors are also requested to follow this guide’s code of conduct.

This guide is built using Quarto which makes editing it easier, provided you have a GitHub account (sign-up at github.com). After you log-in to GitHub, click on the ‘Edit this page’ (available in the left side column) link highlighted with a red ellipse in the image below. This will take you to an editable version of the the source R Markdown file that generated the page you are on:

Screenshot of the toolbar in the HTML version of the guide, with the “Edit this page” link highlighted in red.

Use the issue tracker to raise an issue about the guide’s content or to make a feature request.

  1. The set of packages in the base R distribution that are maintained by the R Core Team.↩︎