[R-pkg-devel] Overcoming CRAN's 5mb vendoring requirement

[Josiah Parry]

>
> ...but that's a luxury someone would have to pay for.
>

I'd happily give up my Netflix subscription for this. I suspect the
R-foundation/consortium could assist as well?

Referring to the "Using Rust in CRAN packages" document we must be able to

...download a specific version from a secure and reliable site


but, as far as I can tell, there is no definition of "secure" or "reliable"
or examples of these.
Is there a specification of availability / uptime for the site? Or
otherwise.

*What venues do we have for working on this issue in a formal manner?*

I think that these small issues add up and really do hamper the ability for
R to grow as a language.
Talented developers (that adjective does not apply to myself) spend *a lot* of
time trying to resolve
these issues. And too many (one is too many) have given up on CRAN and
consequently their
contributions to R have dwindled.

There are a number of really great tools that have to handle this
independently (arrow R packages and DuckDB
are good examples) but they have teams and funding behind them. If the bar
is going to be so high to publish
a package, we need to at least make a ladder (tools, packages, templates
etc) to get there.


----

 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/using_rust.html




On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 1:21 PM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:

>
> Software Heritage (see [1] for their website and [2] for a brief intro I
> gave
> at useR! 2019 in Toulouse) covers GitHub and CRAN [3]. It is by now 'in
> collaboration with UNESCO', supported by a long and posh list of sponsors
> [4]
> and about as good as it gets to 'ensure longevity of artifacts'.
>
> It is of course not meant for downloads during frequent builds.
>
> But given the 'quasi-institutional nature' and sponsorship, we could think
> of
> using GitHub as an 'active cache'. But CRAN is CRAN and as it now stands
> GitHub is not trusted.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>
> Dirk
>
>
> [1] https://www.softwareheritage.org/
> [2] https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/useR2019_swh_cran_talk.pdf
> [3] https://www.softwareheritage.org/faq/ question 2.1
> [4] https://www.softwareheritage.org/support/sponsors/
> --
> dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org
>

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