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Quick poll: When would you like CRAN to archive your package? A: Umm, never? B: Three days before posit::conf, where you're giving a talk about said package

Perhaps your package wasn't compatible enough with an antiquated version of Solaris?

:) If only. Apparently we regex'd too hard for gcc to handle: github.com/apache/arrow....

Hmm, so basically, it's "we found a possible bug in your package so we archived it". 🙄

More or less. I can come up with more positive ways to spin it. The compounding issue here is that contacting CRAN for an exception can be hard.

The embarassing thing is that packages with a minimal test suite probably have an easier time (I suppose the ASAN issue was flagged by the package's test suite?).

Yep. CRANs policies have caused a lot of package maintainers to: 1. Remove tests 2. Remove runnable examples 3. Remove URLs in docs and references (CRAN checks URLS) It's not purely a negative thing though, it's complicated.

And ASAN checks, painful as they are, most often reveal genuine bugs. So checking those is good too. We have the same issues as Debian maintainers (when, say, obscure hardware breaks) and yes a common way out can be to ... disable a test conditionally. Been there, done that. Also at CRAN.

I agree that running a test suite with ASAN can be very useful. I'm just surprised of the automated action to remove / archive a package when a test failure is detected (I'm not aware of Debian having a similar policy btw 😀). But I suspect this is not a new controversy in the R ecosystem.

Not new, no. I recently learned that the arrow R package is one of the most deadlined R packages on CRAN.

Can I assume you are aware that CRAN a) always emails and gives a (public) three week window to fix (which is how I knew about these) and b) often extends this by three weeks more and c) is also amenable to discussion if "reasons". Moreover, Debian removes from testing when a package takes too ...