Case: package removed from CRAN, but not orphaned

2011/11/25 Uwe Ligges<ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>

On 25.11.2011 11:56, Pfaff, Bernhard Dr. wrote:

Dear R-Devel subscriber,

I would like to raise a topic and ask for your advice, guidance.
Today on R-help an issue with a certain package popped up that has been
removed from CRAN, because it failed the checks and/or the dependencies are
not any longer available. The package maintainer has been alerted to this
issue a couple of times and kindly asked to fix the code, such that it
fullfills the CRAN requirements. However, neither a fix is applied, nor has
the package been orphaned such that someone else could take over the
ownership and rectify the package.
In principal, and if I am not mistaken, one could simply take the code,
fix it and release it (the package is under GPL-2). However, I would
consider this as a rather rude approach. Hence, my question would be, if
the R Core team can take the initiative, to declare the package as being
orphaned after a 'warning period' has been elapsed in which the current
maintainer is kindly asked to fix his package. Would it be feasible to ask
R Core to orphan a package?

Best,
Bernhard

ps: Incidentally, I am aware of the new 'orphaned package rules', in
particular under the rubrique 'Possible reasons for orphanizing a package',
point 2). In the case of the package in question, the maintainer does
respond to emails, but either seems to lack action and/or has a different
time scale and awareness of time.

As Duncan wrote already, CRAN is not run by R-core - as you probably know,
I have already maintained parts of CRAN for quite some time before I became
core member.

Let me as one of the CRAN maintainers add:

We know that orphaning would be a nice hint to the community, but it takes
some work and given we have>>  3000 packages, many of them not well
maintained, we have to archive or orphan many packages a year nowadays. Due
the already huge amount of work CRAN maintenance generates, we simply
cannot invest more time given the time constraints.

Note that we archive packages if a maintainer asks us to do so or if the
maintainer is unresponsive on our requests to fix the package. Since we as
CRAN maintainers were unsuccessful to contact or convince the maintainer to
fix, we typically won't invest more time/work on such a package.

Of course, if someone wants to take over an archived package and cannot
get a response from the maintainer (but first try to do so yourself!) then
a request to take over as maintainer can be sent to CRAN.

Currently we are working on a new CRAN policy document that will soon be
published. This document may clarify some further questions and establishes
some stricter policies to reduce the workload of CRAN maintainers.

Just as an idea to make sure that CRAN only contains maintained packages
with a maintainer who feels responsible: Would it be feasible to introduce
a system, so that each year (or for each release of a new version of R) the
maintainers are automatically contacted via email and must reply to have
their packages included in the new spring cleaned version of CRAN?
This
process could be automated, including the email confirmations (like mailing
list subscriptions) and the non-maintained packages could be relocated to a
second CRAN or marked as "will be removed at next springclean"? This would
make sure that CRAN contains only "active" packages.

Cheers,

Rainer

Best wishes,
Uwe Ligges

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