[Rd] Case: package removed from CRAN, but not orphaned

[Uwe Ligges]

On 25.11.2011 11:56, Pfaff, Bernhard Dr. wrote:
> Dear R-Devel subscriber,
>
> I would like to raise a topic and ask for your advice, guidance.
> Today on R-help an issue with a certain package popped up that has been removed from CRAN, because it failed the checks and/or the dependencies are not any longer available. The package maintainer has been alerted to this issue a couple of times and kindly asked to fix the code, such that it fullfills the CRAN requirements. However, neither a fix is applied, nor has the package been orphaned such that someone else could take over the ownership and rectify the package.
> In principal, and if I am not mistaken, one could simply take the code, fix it and release it (the package is under GPL-2). However, I would consider this as a rather rude approach. Hence, my question would be, if the R Core team can take the initiative, to declare the package as being orphaned after a 'warning period' has been elapsed in which the current maintainer is kindly asked to fix his package. Would it be feasible to ask R Core to orphan a package?
>
> Best,
> Bernhard
>
> ps: Incidentally, I am aware of the new 'orphaned package rules', in particular under the rubrique 'Possible reasons for orphanizing a package', point 2). In the case of the package in question, the maintainer does respond to emails, but either seems to lack action and/or has a different time scale and awareness of time.


As Duncan wrote already, CRAN is not run by R-core - as you probably 
know, I have already maintained parts of CRAN for quite some time before 
I became core member.

Let me as one of the CRAN maintainers add:

We know that orphaning would be a nice hint to the community, but it 
takes some work and given we have >> 3000 packages, many of them not 
well maintained, we have to archive or orphan many packages a year 
nowadays. Due the already huge amount of work CRAN maintenance 
generates, we simply cannot invest more time given the time constraints.

Note that we archive packages if a maintainer asks us to do so or if the 
maintainer is unresponsive on our requests to fix the package. Since we 
as CRAN maintainers were unsuccessful to contact or convince the 
maintainer to fix, we typically won't invest more time/work on such a 
package.

Of course, if someone wants to take over an archived package and cannot 
get a response from the maintainer (but first try to do so yourself!) 
then a request to take over as maintainer can be sent to CRAN.

Currently we are working on a new CRAN policy document that will soon be 
published. This document may clarify some further questions and 
establishes some stricter policies to reduce the workload of CRAN 
maintainers.

Best wishes,
Uwe Ligges




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