[R-pkg-devel] R-package-devel Digest, Vol 44, Issue 14

[Daniel Kelley]

> On Dec 22, 2018, at 7:00 AM, r-package-devel-request using r-project.org wrote:
>
> (since it's fairly unlikely to get two random failures in a row).

Flakey links are also a problem for packages, per se, as opposed to revdeps.  For example, I have a package (oce) that has quite a lot of \url{} items in its docs, and I get failures quite often. Sometimes the failures will persist (perhaps intermittently) for days, as work is done on servers, etc.  My policy is to just change \url to \code (usually with a note to tell the user that the link is actually likely to work), and that's not a good thing, because it leads to less testing. I do not know what the best policy is ... maybe a new macro like \checkedurl{} that will make a link if the resource is found, and add a note about the link failing to work, otherwise. That way, the package could still build, and the user would not be stuck with a lot of non-linked URLs in the docs.