DEVELOPER.md

Research Repository Developer Guide

This repository contains multiple research projects and tools for the Lanka Data Foundation.

Projects

• Legislation (legislation/): Acts Navigation & Analysis system.

  • Legislation Developer Guide

• OCR (hugging-face-deepseek-ocr/): OCR Experiments and Tools.

  • OCR Developer Guide

General Best Practices

1. Project Independence

Each project (e.g., legislation) is structured as its own module with its own:

• environment.yml or requirements.txt
• DEVELOPER.md (Project-specific setup)
• tests/

2. Documentation

• Root DEVELOPER.md: This file. High-level overview and links.
• Project DEVELOPER.md: Specific instructions for setting up and running a single project.

3. Tool Usage

• Mamba/Conda-lock: Use strictly defined environments to avoid conflict between research tools.
• Pre-commit: Ensure hooks are enabled to catch linting issues early.
• Git Submodules: Some external tools/data might be included as submodules; always run git submodule update --init --recursive after cloning.

4. Code & Data

• Data Separation: Big datasets should not be committed. Use dvc or specific data/ directories ignored by git.
• Secrets: Never commit API keys. Use .env files and python-dotenv.

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone <repo-url>
   cd research

2. Navigate to your specific project of interest (e.g., legislation) and follow its DEVELOPER.md.