[R-pkg-devel] Maintainer email best practices

[Kenny, Christopher]

Thank you Uwe, Spencer, and Sean,

With your messages in mind and some consideration, it seems that using a single, but permanent, email is a good choice here.

Uwe, thanks for the insight on CRAN capabilities. As always, I will do my best to make sure packages pass the incoming checks before making a final submission.

Spencer, perhaps as a result of when I started working in R, all of the packages are on GitHub. I keep a listing here: https://github.com/christopherkenny#packages-on-cran

Sean, thank you for the suggestion on using forwarding emails. I have two alumni email accounts which should be permanent (absent major university policy changes). My main concern was that using such emails misses the current aspect of professional emails, which at least for academics, often means institutional emails, which change much more for early career researchers these days. Given the other responses, it seems that consistency and control are worthwhile here.

Best,
Chris
________________________________
From: Sean O'Riordain <seanpor using acm.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2025 2:36 AM
To: Kenny, Christopher <christopherkenny using fas.harvard.edu>
Cc: R-package-devel <r-package-devel using r-project.org>; Uwe Ligges <ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] Maintainer email best practices

I have been a member of the ACM for more than 25 years now and through many different jobs and two returns to college.  I have a forwarding email address with the ACM as part of membership.  Indeed I also have one with computer.org<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__computer.org&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=THDFmrpeTKOyrcLq041upiIEnVFL8OavedZCRxanKDr-nF5QUTCbYMqdv37R0psk&m=HhUKlDBm0gkY3WICmQqjXv4NRuM_W5GltBaM0VCFbVz5HnVlVY8ougyJPOtVEiVJ&s=bwmdJ-723rcs-1rspV2XgVDT_HAbKExQCpeifFIk8C0&e=> as part of my membership of th Computer Society of the IEEE.  My university also allows me a TCD.ie email, but that is not being continued for more recent graduates.

#Just a suggestion :-)

Sean O'Riordain
seanpor using acm.org<mailto:seanpor using acm.org>



On Sat 21 Jun 2025, 07:59 Uwe Ligges, <ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de<mailto:ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de>> 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<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__cran.r-2Dproject.org_web_checks_check-5Fresults-5Fchristopherkenny-5Fat-5Ffas.harvard.edu.html&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=THDFmrpeTKOyrcLq041upiIEnVFL8OavedZCRxanKDr-nF5QUTCbYMqdv37R0psk&m=HhUKlDBm0gkY3WICmQqjXv4NRuM_W5GltBaM0VCFbVz5HnVlVY8ougyJPOtVEiVJ&s=NeVvut3z5rXs_Nrd7LXCxWyUNxmRTm5ZM8aR94l6xX0&e=>), 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://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__christophertkenny.com&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=THDFmrpeTKOyrcLq041upiIEnVFL8OavedZCRxanKDr-nF5QUTCbYMqdv37R0psk&m=HhUKlDBm0gkY3WICmQqjXv4NRuM_W5GltBaM0VCFbVz5HnVlVY8ougyJPOtVEiVJ&s=IvjXb0l_YeWWp2h4Z0fQGsJG68QgtjuxJotDQieudxE&e=><https://christophertkenny.com/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__christophertkenny.com_&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=THDFmrpeTKOyrcLq041upiIEnVFL8OavedZCRxanKDr-nF5QUTCbYMqdv37R0psk&m=HhUKlDBm0gkY3WICmQqjXv4NRuM_W5GltBaM0VCFbVz5HnVlVY8ougyJPOtVEiVJ&s=fPIXtLU4ttsIGXCmBIm8s6covCGSzEHQqI0nUHZlqDg&e=>> - christopherkenny using fas.harvard.edu<mailto:christopherkenny using fas.harvard.edu> - (845) 826-4991
> Christopher T. Kenny, PhD, Department of Government, Harvard University
>
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