[R-pkg-devel] URL checks

[Greg Hunt]

With a little experimentation, the problem seems to be the -I switch in
curl, with which the request uses the HTTP HEAD method instead of GET.
Without -I, the requests from curl work for me; with -I, I get negative
responses (403, 503).

While HEAD does not represent a major security threat to a server it gets
caught up when people are disabling unused or unnecessary operations and
features and so at a first approximation, the problem is -I.  Now, there
may also be scraper blocking applied to the CRAN and WinBuilder
infrastructure by the CDN companies, because scraping is a large problem
for many websites, but detecting rejection by cloudflare may be possible if
that is what is happening.


On Thu, 30 Jun 2022 at 07:08, Ivan Krylov <krylov.r00t using gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Jun 2022 22:51:23 +0200 (CEST)
> William Becker <william.becker using bluefoxdata.eu> wrote:
>
> > if someone can point me to a reference where I can work out how to
> > solve the problem, that would be really helpful
>
> The CRAN URL checks page is linked from the CRAN policy:
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/URL_checks.html
>
> Short version is, your links all seem fine, but Cloudflare and other
> content distribution companies don't like the way R checks them. You
> only need to mention that in the submission comment.
>
> There's no technical fix for the problem. DOI checks could be in theory
> adjusted (trading false negatives for false positives), but it's hard to
> get checks working for the rest of the links when the CDN companies
> decide that automated requests like ones produced by R CMD check are
> exactly the kind of thing they should be blocking.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Ivan
>
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