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

[Gábor Csárdi]

Are you fine with using the mac.r-project.org server as a default
mirror on macOS? E.g. in RStudio, on GitHub Actions, etc? That's a lot
of traffic.

mac.r-project.org is also not ideally located (i.e. much slower) for
most users, especially compared to the CDN at cloud.r-project.org.

Do you think it would be possible to keep the old binary packages
around for a day or so? That would not only help with the sync issue,
but also with potentially outdated metadata. AFAIR this is what
Debian/Ubuntu repositories do.

Thanks,
Gabor

On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 3:16 AM Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
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>