There should be four types of commits to any branch; namely:

• NEW: the addition of ONE or two new functions with associated documentation
• BUGFIX: the editing of existing functions to fix problems
• ENHANCEMENT: the editing of existing functions to improve capabilities and/or performance.
• OTHER: Minor edits such as improving documentation or merging edits etc.

Please use these four types as key-words at the start of your commit messages. The use of these key-words (particularly the first three) greatly facilitates automated NEWS file production for the package. By no means are these commits “special” from a technical perspective. Rather they are simply naming conventions that categorize our progress and they are of course plain old Git commits.

Optionally, to add more details to the commit, the Title (the first line) of the message should be followed by ONE empty line and then detailed descriptions. Note that without the empty line, git log will take all message as the title, which may be not well processed by other script, e.g. the script to generate NEWS file.

Here is an example for a typical commit message:

BUGFIX: read.pdb() stores NA values if atom name is "NA"

- example is 1C75
- fixed by using argument na.strings="" in read.table()