William Dunlap wrote:
Our firm would like to route support requests through
a website instead of using email. However R will refuse
to install a package if DESCRIPTION's Maintainer field
does not have a valid email adress or the special value
"ORPHANED". (The check is done with
tools:::.valid_maintainer_field_regexp.)
I imagine a typical Maintainer line for the package "foo"
might be something like
Maintainer: Amalgamated Widget's Support Team
<http://support.amalgamatedwidgets.com/spackage?name=foo>
How much does the package system (or CRAN) depend on
the Maintainer field being an email address? I can imagine
programs would find mailing to an address easier than
dealing with a website, but humans would have a better experience
with a well designed website. Perhaps we could add an optional
%s field to the website so a program could post a small message.
Bill,
as already pointed out by Christophe Dutang, there is the URL field.
CRAN maintainers rely on the e-mail address given in the package's
Maintainer field, particularly to notify (partly automatically like I
do) package maintainers if there packages are broken in a new version of
R or because the packages they depend on changed.
Best wishes,
Uwe
Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Spotfire Inc.
wdunlap tibco.com
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