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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 25 September 2025 at 08:21, Michael Chirico wrote:
| is the SPDX site any more reliable?
| 
| https://spdx.org/licenses/

Great suggestion especially as it even differentiates between GPL "2 exactly"
and "2 or later" (as many of us here do, following R itself).

The look and feel of that site is little more 'ahem' but they make up for
that by being comprehensive. And its seems to be a Linux Foundation
initiative so it may have proper hosting

Dirk
 
| 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
| >
| > ______________________________________________
| > R-package-devel using r-project.org mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
| >

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