[R-pkg-devel] Maintainer email best practices

[Spencer Graves]

Hi, Uwe and Christopher:


UWE: What do you think about maintainers who use a GitHub email address?


CHRISTOPHER: Are the packages on GitHub or some comparable developer 
platform?


Spencer Graves


On 6/21/25 00:58, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> 
> 
> On 21.06.2025 04:23, Kenny, Christopher wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Thank you in advance for your help.
>>
>> I am the maintainer of around 2 dozen packages. I am also an early 
>> career researcher and my insitutional email address will vary 
>> depending on where I am employed over the next few years. If I had 2 
>> or 3 packages, I would just plan to update these as my insitution 
>> changed, but it seems a bit of a bother to CRAN to potentially update 
>> these several times, unless there is strong recommendation to use 
>> current institutional emails above all else.
>>
>> With that in mind, I have 3 related (and perhaps redundant questions):
>>
>>
>>    1.
>> Are there best practices for maintainer emails? I was looking through 
>> the `CRAN_authors_db()` and it looks like there's a lot of variance 
>> between people choosing to use (1) personal vs professional emails and 
>> (2) consistent emails across packages vs many emails for a single 
>> maintainer.
>>
>>
>>    1.
>> As maintainer check results are organized by email (e.g. https:// 
>> cran.r-project.org/web/checks/ 
>> check_results_christopherkenny_at_fas.harvard.edu.html), is it best to 
>> mass update packages to some personal, non-institutional email over a 
>> short period of time to ensure that all checks/notes/warnings/errors 
>> are assigned to the same person? Said another way: does CRAN prefer 
>> that maintainers use a common email, since that seems to be our 
>> primary identifier?
>>
>>    2.
>> If updating multiple packages with a new maintainer email account, is 
>> there a "best way" to do this to avoid sending CRAN 20-something 
>> unique emails and wasting their time each time?
>>
>> For what it's worth, many of the newer checks since R 4.5.0 have 
>> highlighted minor NOTES for imperfect patterns that I was using for 
>> the plurarlity of my packages, so I do need to send in some best- 
>> practice-type updates over the summer anyway. My graduate school email 
>> will have a cutoff date about a year from now, so I'm hoping to set up 
>> any changes well before it disappears.
> 
> 
> Thanks for thinking about mail address updates early. This is the most 
> important part of the process. Too many people let their maintainer 
> addresses run out of service.
> I think it is a good idea to try to use one address for all your 
> packages, but it is not a requirement.
> Finally, when well organized and prepared the packages pass checks 
> automatically, then we just need to publish after ajil cinfirmation is 
> received. Then we can well handle 20 submissions for a mail change, 
> don't worry.
> 
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
> 
> 
>>    1.
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Chris
>>
>> christophertkenny.com<https://christophertkenny.com/> - 
>> christopherkenny using fas.harvard.edu - (845) 826-4991
>> Christopher T. Kenny, PhD, Department of Government, Harvard University
>>
>>     [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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