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R packages from sources other than CRAN

See original GitHub issue

How to deal with R package sources other than CRAN?

Most R packages are using CRAN as source, which serves as a good quality gate as CRAN does check the package and also does some lifecycle management if required. (Option A)

There are also some R packages which are created directly from github archives https://github.com/*/$pkg/{archive, releases}/*.{zip, tar.gz}. There is no additional CRAN which does checks, it is all up to the repo contributors their CI and the conda package maintainer to bring a “good” version to conda-forge. (Option B)

Currently around 1200 packages are built from CRAN and around 15 are built from github:

rg cran feedstocks -g "**/r-*/*/meta.yaml" --files-with-matches | wc -l
rg cran feedstocks -g "**/r-*/*/meta.yaml" --files-without-match | wc -l

There is now a package [0] with some unique functionality following a changing API, that was packaged via CRAN but is now outdated and not working anymore. New releases are all done via a drat repo. Releasing again to CRAN seems not to happen [1] “Option A” and getting their releases tagged in the repo also seems not to happen [2], which would enable “Option B”.

The drat repo is owned by the same github project as package source code repo. And it is so more or less as reliable as the source code repo itself or as to what I refer to as “Option B”.

For more details and how a change looks like, see also https://github.com/conda-forge/r-aws.s3-feedstock/pull/3

Possible options here I see here:

Sources other than CRAN should be the exception, but are fine.
There is no general rule for switching sources to other than CRAN, it requires negotiation with at least two recipe maintainers.
Packages that follow a somehow fast changing API can be packaged from sources other than CRAN.
Drat is fine for the aws.* packages, but we don’t decide anything else now.

Tagging the R package maintainers to get notified: @johanneskoester, @bgruening, @daler, @jdblischak, @cbrueffer

What do you think?

Thanks

Daniel

[0] https://github.com/conda-forge/r-aws.s3-feedstock [1] https://github.com/cloudyr/aws.s3/issues/239 [2] https://github.com/cloudyr/aws.s3/issues/257