Oce is an R package for processing oceanographic data. Stable versions of the package are normally installed from within R, with the code presented here being intended for advanced users.

The git branching model is used to organize the code. The master branch holds the code used in the official releases, and is mainly provided to document the history of those releases. It is updated only when new versions of Oce are updated to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), perhaps once a month. The develop branch may be updated several times per day, as the author fixes bugs or adds features that are motivated by day-to-day usage. This is the branch favoured by users who need new features or would like to help the author in the development of Oce. The easy way to install the develop branch is to execute the following commands in R:

library(devtools)
install_github('oce', 'dankelley', 'develop')

(This uses the devtools package, which is one of many powerful tools written by Hadley Wickham; his site on github is https://github.com/hadley.)

In addition to the master and develop branches, there is a testing branch that is sometimes used to try out variants of new features, and any number of temporary branches that are used to address bugs or requests for new features. These bugs and requests are generally made through the GitHub issue system, and so the branches are named after the issues, e.g. a branch named issue100 would address the GitHub issue numbered 100.

Oce is emphatically an open-source system, and so the participation of users is very important. This is why Git is used for version control of the Oce source code, and also why GitHub is the host for that code. All users are invited to take part in the development process, whether by suggesting features, reporting bugs, or just watching as others do such things. Oceanography is a highly collaborative discipline, so it makes sense that the evolution of the Oce package be similarly collaborative.