[Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Yihui Xie]

I cannot speak for other package authors, but for all my own packages,
I have provided the BugReports field in DESCRIPTION that points to the
Github issues page. You can probably use this field to check if a
package is on Github or not. If it is, you may just fork the original
repo instead of creating a new one from the CRAN package. I'm not sure
how technically difficult it would be for you. Thanks for the
wonderful work!

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Web: http://yihui.name


On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 2:45 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>
> wrote:
>
>> One issue I have with this is that it doesn't point to the original GitHub
>> repositories of the packages, so you end up with additional repositories on
>> Github in Gabor's name that have nothing to do with the actual Github
>> repositories of the packages. I understand that it's technically necessary,
>> but I fear it will lead to a lot of confusion...
>
>
> Well, we point to the original GitHub repo is that is given in the URL
> field. It would be nice to have an "official" field for source code
> repository in DESCRIPTION.
>
> But I agree with you that this has great potential for confusion. Several
> people have been sending pull requests to github.com/cran repos, most of
> them not realizing that they are not the right repos to fork. (Although
> many packages are not on GH or any other similar service, and then are kind
> of the places to fork.)
>
> I could have a large warning popup on the link from r-pkg.org, with red
> flags, and you would see this before the actual repo. But this has its own
> problems, like being annoying after a while, how to turn it off with
> browser cookies, etc.
>
> The best would be to somehow have a warning on the GitHub repo pages, but
> there isn't a lot I can modify there if I don't want to change/add the
> README file, which would effectively change the package. I could probably
> add 'WARNING: this is a read-only mirror, and not the original package
> repository' to the one-line description on the top.
>
> If you have other ideas, please let me know.
>
> Gabor