URL checks
I encountered the same issue today with https://astrostatistics.psu.edu/. This is a trust chain issue, as explained here: https://whatsmychaincert.com/?astrostatistics.psu.edu. I've worked for a couple of years on a project to increase HTTPS adoption on the web and we noticed that this type of error is very common, and that website maintainers are often unresponsive to requests to fix this issue. Therefore, I totally agree with Kirill that a list of known false-positive/exceptions would be a great addition to save time to both the CRAN team and package developers. Hugo
On 07/01/2021 15:45, Kirill M?ller via R-devel wrote:
One other failure mode: SSL certificates trusted by browsers that are not installed on the check machine, e.g. the "GEANT Vereniging" certificate from https://relational.fit.cvut.cz/ . K On 07.01.21 12:14, Kirill M?ller via R-devel wrote:
Hi The URL checks in R CMD check test all links in the README and vignettes for broken or redirected links. In many cases this improves documentation, I see problems with this approach which I have detailed below. I'm writing to this mailing list because I think the change needs to happen in R's check routines. I propose to introduce an "allow-list" for URLs, to reduce the burden on both CRAN and package maintainers. Comments are greatly appreciated. Best regards Kirill # Problems with the detection of broken/redirected URLs ## 301 should often be 307, how to change? Many web sites use a 301 redirection code that probably should be a 307. For example, https://www.oracle.com and https://www.oracle.com/ both redirect to https://www.oracle.com/index.html with a 301. I suspect the company still wants oracle.com to be recognized as the primary entry point of their web presence (to reserve the right to move the redirection to a different location later), I haven't checked with their PR department though. If that's true, the redirect probably should be a 307, which should be fixed by their IT department which I haven't contacted yet either. $ curl -i https://www.oracle.com HTTP/2 301 server: AkamaiGHost content-length: 0 location: https://www.oracle.com/index.html ... ## User agent detection twitter.com responds with a 400 error for requests without a user agent string hinting at an accepted browser. $ curl -i https://twitter.com/ HTTP/2 400 ... <body>...<p>Please switch to a supported browser...</p>...</body> $ curl -s -i https://twitter.com/ -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0" | head -n 1 HTTP/2 200 # Impact While the latter problem *could* be fixed by supplying a browser-like user agent string, the former problem is virtually unfixable -- so many web sites should use 307 instead of 301 but don't. The above list is also incomplete -- think of unreliable links, HTTP links, other failure modes... This affects me as a package maintainer, I have the choice to either change the links to incorrect versions, or remove them altogether. I can also choose to explain each broken link to CRAN, this subjects the team to undue burden I think. Submitting a package with NOTEs delays the release for a package which I must release very soon to avoid having it pulled from CRAN, I'd rather not risk that -- hence I need to remove the link and put it back later. I'm aware of https://github.com/r-lib/urlchecker, this alleviates the problem but ultimately doesn't solve it. # Proposed solution ## Allow-list A file inst/URL that lists all URLs where failures are allowed -- possibly with a list of the HTTP codes accepted for that link. Example: https://oracle.com/ 301 https://twitter.com/drob/status/1224851726068527106 400
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