[R] reliability of R-Forge?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 26 August 2010 at 11:28, R P Herrold wrote:
| On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Gavin Simpson wrote:
| 
| > On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 02:30 -0400, David Kane wrote:
| >> How reliable is R-Forge? http://r-forge.r-project.org/
| >>
| >> It is down now (for me). Reporting "R-Forge Could Not Connect to Database: "
| 
| late to chime in, so had tossed the first piece.  As this 
| relates to 'reliability of R-Forge' in the sense of possible 
| process issues, rather than availability of the archive, I 
| wanted to 'tag into' this thread
| 
| I 'mirror' r-forge, so I have not seen this ...
| 
| One thing I note, mirroring r-forge, and processing 'diffs' 
| netween successive days, is that the md5sums of some packages 
| regularly change without version number bumps.  From this 
| morning's report in my email:
| 
| Thu Aug 26 04:30:01 EDT 2010
| 
| --- /tmp/rforge-pre.txt 2010-08-26 04:30:33.000000000 -0400
| +++ /tmp/rforge-post.txt        2010-08-26 04:38:03.000000000 
| -0400
| @@ -8,18 +8,18 @@
|   AquaEnv_1.0-1.tar.gz   615059a5369d1aba149e6142fedffdde
|   ArvoRe_0.1.6.tar.gz    c955ae7c64c4270740172ad2219060ff
|   BB_2010.7-1.tar.gz     4f85093ab24fac5c0b91539ec6efb8b7
| -BCE_2.0.tar.gz 5a3fe3ecabbe2b2e278f6a48fc19d18d
| -BIOMOD_1.1-5.tar.gz    d2f74f21bc8858844f8d71627fd8e687
| +BCE_2.0.tar.gz 65a968c586e729a1c1ca34a37f5c293a
| +BIOMOD_1.1-5.tar.gz    6929e5ad6a14709de7065286ec684942
|   ...
| -BTSPAS_2010.08.tar.gz  16b8f265846a512c329f0b52ba1924ab
| +BTSPAS_2010.08.tar.gz  809a96b11f1094e95b217af113abd0ac
|   ...
| -BayesR_0.1-1.tar.gz    72bd41c90845032eb9d15c4c6d086dec
| +BayesFactorPCL_0.5.tar.gz      173ab741c399309314eff240a4c3cd6f
| +BayesR_0.1-1.tar.gz    9560b511f1b955a60529599672d58fea
|   ...
| -BiplotGUI_0.0-6.tar.gz 594b3a275cde018eaa74e1ef974dd522
| +BiplotGUI_0.0-6.tar.gz 857a484fdba6cb97be4e42e38bb6d0fd
|   ...
| -IsoGene_1.0-18.tar.gz  679a5aecb7182474ed6a870fa52ca2e3
| +IsoGene_1.0-18.tar.gz  f37572957b2a9846a8d738ec88ac8690
| 
| and so forth.  I've not taken the trime to understand why 
| seemingly new versions are appearing without version bumps 
| yet.
| 
| Is anyone aware of explanations, other than a release process 
| that does not require unique versioning of differing content? 
| [it seems pretty basic to me that a 'receiver' of new content 
| could do the checks I do, and decline to push conflicting 
| md5sums over an identically named prior candidate in archive]

Version numbers change only when DESCRIPTION/Version gets updated.

Content (of the tarball) and thusly md5sum changes whenever _any_ file
in the archive changes.

Methinks you tricked yourself into assuming tarballs have to be constant
because they are on CRAN _where changes happen only with new releases_.  

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com