[R-pkg-devel] Recurrent link timeout for common license at R CMD check

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Most of the README.md files for my package list the license I chose, and most
do so via a 'badge' showing the license and a link to the 'upstream' source
of the license.  So far, so good.

As I happen to prefer GPL licenses, I link to the fsf.org website. And
several recent package uploads of mine were upheld and moved to 'Inspect'
state forcing poor overworked Uwe Ligges to manually look at the log file
to conclude 'yep, spurious, all good here' because of a mere timeout.

Same this morning: even after fiddling with the URL I use, testing several
times from here and noticing that 'oh dear this is apparently simply random'
I got one pass (Dortmund, Windows) and one fail (Vienna, Linux) so back to
'Inspect' and wasting Uwe's time it is.

I would rather skip that step and take advantage of automation at CRAN and
not create extra work. I am not quite sure what the best way forward is. I
can think of saying 'ok, folks in Boston cannot run a server' and link to
the Wikipedia page of the GPL. Seems wrong though as we like to show the
original text. I notice that the R website does the same by providing GPL-2
via a lopy copy: https://www.r-project.org/COPYING   Now, for the package I
was working on this morning I actually needed GPL-3 and not GPL-2 so no luck
there. 

Short of giving up and creating a GitHub Pages hosted copy of the licenses I
may need, is there another good source ... without the server timing out?
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ is pretty good but doesn't of course
provide GPL-2 so no luck for me there for most of my 'GPL (>= 2)' packages.

Anybody have a better fix or idea? Maybe use the R sources (!!) and rely on
GitHub (most likely via a CDN) serving the licenses in 

  https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/tree/main/share/licenses 
  https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/blob/main/share/licenses/license.db

where via the .db (ascii text) file ones sees that all these licenses _are_
in fact served via

  https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/

which even acts as a 'pretty' landing page (which I think I once knew
existed, looked for but could not locate via links from either the top-level
www.r-project.org or cran.r-project.org). 

So should we all link to that?

Or not because it puts yet more load on the poor main r-project.org server
(or should we maybe CDN that or parts of it via cloudflare.com ?)

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org