CRAN metadata inconsistencies for macOS binaries
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 That would not only help with the sync issue, but also with potentially outdated metadata.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 at r-project.org> wrote:
G?bor,
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, G?bor Cs?rdi <csardi.gabor at 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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