[R-pkg-devel] Orphaned Package listing trouble?

[Joseph Stachelek]

Hello all,

I am interested in updating a CRAN package which has the primary
purpose of serving a particular government database. This package has
seen no activity since 2014 and is now out-of-date. I have contacted
the maintainer email (waited several weeks) to offer to update the
package but received no response.

What should I do? 

I assume that I cannot simply fix the package, change the maintainer
email, and submit to CRAN because I don't think the package has not
been officially orphaned. The official instructions say this:

> Everybody is more than welcome to take over as maintainer of an
orphaned package. Simply download the package sources, make changes if
necessary (respecting original author and license!) and resubmit the
package to CRAN with your name as maintainer in the DESCRIPTION file of
the package.

The reason I am not sure if it has been orphaned is that I am having
trouble viewing the orphaned package listing. The following page is
blank for me (shows no package listings):  
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Orphaned

-jsta