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

[Ben Bolker]

   My 'revdepcheck' is obsolete, superseded by r-lib/revdepcheck (which 
it does predate by about a year ...)

  Dirk Eddelbuettel maintains an automated system for diffs of the CRAN 
repository policy https://github.com/eddelbuettel/crp , or follow 
@CRANPolicyWatch -- similar to your idea about WRE diffs.

  You can view a history of WRE (with diffs) at 
https://github.com/wch/r-source/commits/trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi

   I believe CRAN has devoted some resources to hiring editorial 
assistants who handle some of the lower-level tasks ...





On 10/19/20 1:05 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
> 
> 
> 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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>>
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