New URL redirect checks

Me too. I have changed some valid URLs in \url{} to \verb{} just to
avoid these check NOTEs. I do appreciate the check for the validity of
URLs in packages, especially those dead links (404), but discouraging
URLs with status code other than 200 (such as 301) feels like
overdoing the job. After I "hide" links from R CMD check with \verb{}
, it will be hard to know if these links are still valid in the
future.

Regards,
Yihui

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 1:17 PM Kevin Wright <kw.stat at gmail.com> wrote:

Isn't the whole concept of DOI basically link-shortening/redirecting?

For example, this link
https://doi.org/10.2134/agronj2016.07.0395
redirects to
https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/agronj2016.07.0395

As a side note, I got so fed up with CRAN check complaints about (perfectly valid) re-directs that I refuse to use the \url{} tag anymore.

Kevin


On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 8:32 AM Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:

I don't have an opinion on the URL shorteners, but how about the
original question? Redirection can be extremely useful in general.
Shortening URLs is only one of its possible applications. FWIW, CRAN
uses (303) redirect itself, e.g.,
https://cran.r-project.org/package=MASS is redirected to
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MASS/index.html Should these
"canonical" CRAN links be disallowed in packages, too? Just as another
example, https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/release.html is
redirected to the latest Windows installer of R (through the <meta>
tag).

If the intent of the new URL redirect check is to disallow using URL
shorteners like bit.ly or nyti.ms, that may be fair, but it it is to
disallow using any URLs that are redirected, I think this CRAN policy
may be worth a reconsideration.

Regards,
Yihui
--
https://yihui.org


On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:26 AM G?bor Cs?rdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> wrote:

Right, I am sorry, I did not realize the security aspect here. I guess
I unconsciously treated CRAN package authors as a trusted source.

Thanks for the correction and clarification, and to CRAN for
implementing these checks. :)

G.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:50 PM Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 16/09/2020 4:51 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:

I can't comment for CRAN, but generally, shorteners are considered security risk so regardless of the 301 handling I think flagging those is a good idea. Also I think it is particularly bad to use them in manuals because it hides the target so the user has no idea what hey will get.

I agree, and we do have \href{}{} in Rd files and similar in other
formats for giving text of a link different than the URL if the URL is
inconveniently long.  There's still a bit of a security issue though:
the built in help browser (at least in MacOS) doesn't show the full URL
when you hover over the link, as most browsers do.  So one could have

\href{https://disney.org}{https://horrible.web.site}

Duncan Murdoch

Cheers,
Simon

On Sep 17, 2020, at 5:35 AM, G?bor Cs?rdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

the new CRAN URL checks flag HTTP 301 redirects. While I understand
the intent, I think this is unfortunate, because several URL shortener
services use 301 redirects, and often a shorter URL is actually better
in a manual page than a longer one that can be several lines long in
the console and also potentially truncated in the PDF manual.

Some example shorteners that are flagged:

db <- tools:::url_db(c("https://nyti.ms", "https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE"), "README")
tools:::check_url_db(db)

URL: https://nyti.ms (moved to https://www.nytimes.com/)
From: README
Status: 200
Message: OK

URL: https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE (moved to
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-47975564)
From: README
Status: 200
Message: OK

--
Kevin Wright