[R-pkg-devel] Maintainer a Group

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/06/2019 5:52 p.m., John Muschelli wrote:
> So a single email is not a mailing list and it's a research group, so not
> really a corporate entity.  I don't see WHY explicitly this isn't allowed.
> I understand that this decision has been made with a lot of thought in
> mind, though.  This would make it much easier for research groups to not
> orphan packages because the maintainer/student leaves and we can't really
> centralize our code bases.

Pick one member of the group to be the maintainer. Don't choose someone 
who is likely to leave, choose a responsible person who is likely to be 
around a long time. If that person does leave, being responsible, 
they'll pass the role to someone else in the group.  If they don't, 
another member of the group can volunteer to CRAN to take over as 
maintainer after the package is orphaned because the original maintainer 
is not responding to CRAN requests.

On the other hand, if you were allowed to choose the group email as 
maintainer, requests from CRAN could be ignored, because everyone might 
assume it's someone else's responsibility to respond.

Duncan Murdoch