[Rd] New URL redirect checks

[Yihui Xie]

I don't have an opinion on the URL shorteners, but how about the
original question? Redirection can be extremely useful in general.
Shortening URLs is only one of its possible applications. FWIW, CRAN
uses (303) redirect itself, e.g.,
https://cran.r-project.org/package=MASS is redirected to
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MASS/index.html Should these
"canonical" CRAN links be disallowed in packages, too? Just as another
example, https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/release.html is
redirected to the latest Windows installer of R (through the <meta>
tag).

If the intent of the new URL redirect check is to disallow using URL
shorteners like bit.ly or nyti.ms, that may be fair, but it it is to
disallow using any URLs that are redirected, I think this CRAN policy
may be worth a reconsideration.

Regards,
Yihui
--
https://yihui.org


On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:26 AM Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Right, I am sorry, I did not realize the security aspect here. I guess
> I unconsciously treated CRAN package authors as a trusted source.
>
> Thanks for the correction and clarification, and to CRAN for
> implementing these checks. :)
>
> G.
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:50 PM Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 16/09/2020 4:51 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:
> > > I can't comment for CRAN, but generally, shorteners are considered security risk so regardless of the 301 handling I think flagging those is a good idea. Also I think it is particularly bad to use them in manuals because it hides the target so the user has no idea what hey will get.
> >
> > I agree, and we do have \href{}{} in Rd files and similar in other
> > formats for giving text of a link different than the URL if the URL is
> > inconveniently long.  There's still a bit of a security issue though:
> > the built in help browser (at least in MacOS) doesn't show the full URL
> > when you hover over the link, as most browsers do.  So one could have
> >
> > \href{https://disney.org}{https://horrible.web.site}
> >
> > Duncan Murdoch
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > Simon
> > >
> > >
> > >> On Sep 17, 2020, at 5:35 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Dear all,
> > >>
> > >> the new CRAN URL checks flag HTTP 301 redirects. While I understand
> > >> the intent, I think this is unfortunate, because several URL shortener
> > >> services use 301 redirects, and often a shorter URL is actually better
> > >> in a manual page than a longer one that can be several lines long in
> > >> the console and also potentially truncated in the PDF manual.
> > >>
> > >> Some example shorteners that are flagged:
> > >>
> > >>> db <- tools:::url_db(c("https://nyti.ms", "https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE"), "README")
> > >>> tools:::check_url_db(db)
> > >> URL: https://nyti.ms (moved to https://www.nytimes.com/)
> > >> From: README
> > >> Status: 200
> > >> Message: OK
> > >>
> > >> URL: https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE (moved to
> > >> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-47975564)
> > >> From: README
> > >> Status: 200
> > >> Message: OK
> > >>
> > >> ______________________________________________
> > >> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >>
> > >
> > > ______________________________________________
> > > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >
> >
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel