Roger,
just to you: Thanks for taking the time! I hope that Ari follows your
recommendation, fingers crossed.
Best wishes,
Achim
On Thu, 13 Feb 2025, Roger Bivand via R-help wrote:
Ari,
There were multiple errors in the acs package. If CRAN states that the
maintainer abandoned it, that is what happened. Had you reached out to Ezra
Glenn (cc-ed here) and offered to help keep the package maintained, this hiccup
need not have happened.
The three problems were:
1) stale URLs using http: not https:, of which some are dead (locally changed
to https:, so reported as such):
Found the following (possibly) invalid URLs:
URL: https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn
From: DESCRIPTION
Status: 404
Message: Not Found
URL: https://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
From: DESCRIPTION
man/acs-package.Rd
Status: 403
Message: Forbidden
URL: https://factfinder2.census.gov
From: man/read.acs.Rd
Status: Error
Message: libcurl error code 28:
Connection timed out after 60000 milliseconds
URL: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
From: man/cpi.Rd
Status: 403
Message: Forbidden
2) multiple uses of class() == "string" - class() may return a vector of length
> 1, so for some years it has been required that inherits() be used, to permit the test
to succeed even when the required class is not first. This was discussed in 2019 in
https://blog.r-project.org/2019/11/09/when-you-think-class.-think-again/index.html
3) The first lines of configure and cleanup were #! /bin/bash - see
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-ints.html#index-_005fR_005fCHECK_005fBASHISMS_005f
for why this isn't robust (for example macOS doesn't use bash as its default
shell, and maybe might not work correctly.
I would think that CRAN approached the maintainer multiple times over a period
of many months to clear these inconsistencies. You assert elsewhere that if it
worked before, you might expect it to continue to work. However, things like
failing a class test because some upstream package has re-ordered the class
vector have become more of a problem as the CRAN package count has grown, not
necessarily for this package but in general, so that rules are tightened in the
light of experience.
I attach separately for the direct addressees a corrected version of the
package as far as I can go, since for the failing URLs, it isn't very clear
what to do.
I would suggest that you, Ari, are best placed to offer to take over the
package, meaning that as soon as you get a fixed version of acs to CRAN, you
can re-submit your valued choroplethr to CRAN and be a bit better
future-proofed. Since you do use github, I'd suggest using an acs repo there
and running CI both for acs and for choroplethr using the acs on github. That
would give you advance notice of possible rule tightening in R-devel.
Hope this helps,
Roger
--
Roger Bivand
Emeritus Professor
Norwegian School of Economics
Postboks 3490 Ytre Sandviken, 5045 Bergen, Norway
roger.biv...@nhh.no
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