The develop branch

Ideally, all development should be done in the develop branch of the package GithHub repository. The aim should be to have a workable version in develop branch, so make sure your package passes R CMD check locally before pushing to the develop branch.

The main branch

The head of the main branch should be the latest released version of the package. No changes should be directly pushed to the main branch.

Package maintainers are responsible for ‘protecting’ their main branch with GitHub rules.

Continuous integration

TODO

Version numbering

Each package has a three-digit version number.

New micro versions (e.g. from 4.3.2 to 4.3.3) indicate bug fixes only. No new functionality, and forward and backward compatibility are guaranteed
New minor versions (e.g. from 4.3.3 to 4.4.0) indicate added functionality. Only backward compatibility is guaranteed
New major versions (e.g. from 4.4.0 to 5.0.0) indicate major revisions. All bets are off in terms of compatibility

Creating a release