[R-pkg-devel] CRAN pending status , left up in the air

[Spencer Graves]

On 2020-10-19 10:34, Rafael H. M. Pereira wrote:
> Thank you  Dirk and Hugo for your responses. I guess I'll just have to be
> patient and wait.
> 
> I can only imagine how the CRAN team is overwhelmed by the exponential
> growth of package submissions. I wonder, though, whether the CRAN
> maintainers and the R community more broadly are thinking about
> alternatives to deal with such growing demand without compromising the
> speed and consistency/quality of package development. Expanding the team of
> CRAN maintainers would be the most obvious solution but I confess I'm not
> familiar enough with the whole process to assess what would be the best
> routes of action to tackle this bottleneck.


	  From my experience, it looks to me like their primary approach to 
handling the increased volume has been to improve automation.  In the 
spirit of brainstorming, I'd like to share other ideas on this:


MAKE IT EASY FOR A USER TO CHECK A DIFF FILE OF "Writing R Extensions" 
COMPARING THE CURRENT VERSION WITH ANY PREVIOUS ONE.


	  For example, every article on Wikipedia has a "View History" tab. 
That lists the dates of all the revisions with a terse summary of what 
was changed in each.  I can click on any two and then click "Compare" to 
see all the changes in that period.


	  I'm not going to reread every word of "Writing R Extensions" every 
time I submit something to CRAN.  However, I would be willing to review 
a diff file if it were easy for me to do that.  (And I'm NOT going to 
create my own private file copy of "Writing R Extensions" and manually 
create such a diff file.)


IMPROVE THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE CRAN TEAM AND OTHER DOCUMENTATION 
OF HOW TO PREPARE A PACKAGE FOR CRAN


	  I know two sources of information on that:


		    * Wickham and Bryan, R Packages (https://r-pkgs.org).  I created a 
"cran-comments.md" file based on their recommendations, and missed their 
comment that it should be in ".Rbuildignore".  My latest CRAN submission 
was rejected partly because of that.


		    * Colin Fay, "Preparing your package for a CRAN submission" 
(https://github.com/ThinkR-open/prepare-for-cran).  These instructions 
follow Wickham and Bryan in recommending "devtools::revdep_check()". 
Sadly, "revdep_check" is not currently in devtools but in a package 
called revdepcheck.  Worse, that package is not available on CRAN and 
appears twice on GitHub.  The original by bbolker has not been updated 
in 5 years.  The version that is currently maintained is 
"https://github.com/r-lib/revdepcheck".  Fortunately, Hadley Wickham is 
the leading contributor to the latter, so writing him may help correct 
that infelicity, but I should also write to Colin Fay.


CRAN REVIEW GROUPS:  There are now 41 different "CRAN Task Views".  We 
could ask the maintainer of each Task View to try to recruit a committee 
around each one to discuss coverage and integration.  Each committee 
could be asked to coordinate via email and in virtual meetings.  They 
could be asked to pick 3 standard times for their virtual meetings, so 
anyone in the world would not always be excluded from a meeting that was 
3 AM their time.  Each package maintainer would be asked to specify at 
least one "Task View" for each package and be willing to discuss 
overlap, etc., with others.  This might be a topic for the next useR 
conference.


	  Comments?
	  Best Wishes,
	  Spencer Graves


> best
> 
> Rafael H M Pereira
> 
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 5:46 AM Hugo Gruson <hugo.gruson+R using normalesup.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> this is a bit tricky since the documentation on the dashboard comes from
>> an official, authoritative, source: the R journal [1].
>>
>> "pending: if a decision is pending a response from the package
>> maintainer: If an additional issue was present in the package that we
>> cannot check for in the incoming checks (such as the BLAS issues
>> mentioned in the section above), the maintainer is automatically asked
>> whether these issues have been fixed. Same is true for change of
>> maintainer (or maintainer's mail address) where the old maintainer (old
>> address) is automatically asked to confirm the maintainer change. The
>> answers have to be processed manually."
>>
>> As Dirk explains and as reported in
>> https://github.com/lockedata/cransays/issues/29, it is likely not true
>> anymore but in the absence of further official information, it is
>> difficult to issue a fix.
>>
>> A later issue of the R journal [2] introduces the "waiting" and
>> "newbies" categories but does not expand on the new role of "pending".
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Hugo
>>
>> [1]: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2018-1/cran.pdf
>> [2]: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2019-1/cran.pdf
>>
>> On 19/10/2020 02:18, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>>>
>>> On 18 October 2020 at 20:56, Rafael H. M. Pereira wrote:
>>> | The CRAN incoming Dashboard indicates that the status of my package
>> (r5r)
>>> | is "pending", which means 'the CRAN maintainers are waiting for an
>> action
>>> | on your side. You should check your emails!'.
>>>
>>> AFAICT the text there is wrong: it corresponds to state 'waiting' as
>>> 'pending' means CRAN is pondering the state of the package.
>>>
>>> Your package has only been there for three (mostly weekend) days which is
>>> nothing. I have one 'waiting' for five days now and it is simply
>> (AFAICT) a
>>> false positive. Plus, it had already been delayed by a spurious
>> compilation
>>> error on their end before that so the total is well over a week now. Very
>>> frustrating.  But there is exactly zero you or I can do about it.
>>>
>>> | However, I haven't received any email with guidance on how to proceed.
>> Is
>>> | there any CRAN webpage to check the latest check results and get a
>> sense of
>>> | what I should be doing?
>>>
>>> No.
>>>
>>> I can only suggest to trust official documentation (Writing R Extensions,
>>> CRAN Repository Policy) more. Asking here is also better than guessing.
>>>
>>> Dirk
>>>
>>
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