[R-SIG-Mac] CRAN metadata inconsistencies for macOS binaries

[Simon Urbanek]

Gábor,

if the update is big enough then it is possible that the packages are synced before the index due to the time it takes to transfer all the content. If you have issues, please use the master server, i.e.,

install.packages("proxy", repos="https://mac.r-project.org")

since that one is guaranteed to be consistent: it is populated by first copying all new packages from the build machines and only then the index is updated and only after that the old versions are deleted. You can check if a mirror may be inconsistent by checking for the existence of the "00_COPYING…" file in the repository - that one is copied before the first package and is removed when the index is synced.

Cheers,
Simon


> On 12 Dec 2025, at 10:15, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This has been happening recently for newly published packages. The new
> binary is built, the old one is removed, but the metadata is not
> updated yet, at least not on the main CRAN server.
> 
> ❯ install.packages("proxy", repos = "https://cran.r-project.org")
> Installing package into ‘/Users/gaborcsardi/Library/R/arm64/4.5/library’
> (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
> trying URL 'https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/proxy_0.4-27.tgz'
> Error in download.file(urls, destfiles, "libcurl", mode = "wb", ...) :
>  cannot open URL
> 'https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/proxy_0.4-27.tgz'
> In addition: Warning message:
> In download.file(urls, destfiles, "libcurl", mode = "wb", ...) :
>  cannot open URL
> 'https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/proxy_0.4-27.tgz':
> HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
> Warning in download.packages(pkgs, destdir = tmpd, available = available,  :
>  download of package ‘proxy’ failed
> 
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac using r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>