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Contributing to mcp

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md

Thank you for your interest in contributing to mcp! This document outlines guidelines and developer workflows for running tests and contributing code.

Submitting code

Create pull request to the dev branch. Before that: * Run Sys.setenv(MCP_TEST_LEVEL = "release"); devtools::test() * Go through relevant mcp::release_questions() - skip those only relevant for CRAN upload. * Once pull request is created, check the workflows initiated on github that all tests pass.

AI-based bug finding is welcome and is actively used during development of mcp. See dev/promot* for prompts.

See dev/DECISIONS.md for decisions made during development to balance functionality/bug-free against code simplicity. It is better to have simple/readable code than to add 200 lines of code to fix a rare edge case.

See dev/TERMINOLOGY.md for the vocabulary used in documentation, messages, and output, e.g., “bounds” and “specified” vs. “marginal” priors.

Branches

  • main is the current CRAN version. It renders site https://lindeloev.github.io/mcp/ which is the public documentation of the CRAN version, tracked by crawlers etc.
  • dev is current dev release. It should generally be bug-free but the API may change until merged into main (on new CRAN release). dev renders site to https://lindeloev.github.io/mcp/dev/ which is not tracked by crawlers etc.
  • Other branches are feature branches which should be merged into dev if intended for eventual release.

About test levels

Sys.setenv(MCP_TEST_LEVEL = "release"); devtools::test() is intended for development testing. * Runs a few heavier tests involving full model fits (see tests/testthat/fits-*.R scripts) * Renders and compares mcp_example() plots to reference (using vdiffr), etc. For speedup, also set e.g. Sys.setenv(NCPUs = 11). If plots mismatch, use testthat::snapshot_review() to review.

Sys.setenv(CI = "true"); devtools::test() (without MCP_TEST_LEVEL set) is the defaul CRAN/github test setting where short test times are required. It includes essential and fast tests.