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

[Michael Chirico]

is the SPDX site any more reliable?

https://spdx.org/licenses/

On Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:47 AM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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