Update R-package CRAN releases

It seems that the R package versions are out of date on Software Heritage.

For example, for the 'sf' package, the latest version is:

• 1.0-9 on SwH
• 1.0-17 on the CRAN (intermediate versions are also missing; see 'sf' archives)

This seems to be the case for many (all?) packages...

This is a bug on the ordering of releases from our side as we have used lexicographic order, if you check the releases list, we have archived up to release 1.0-16.

Nevertheless, it seems our CRAN lister only fetches releases that have been archived on CRAN and thus misses the latest version for each package, likely due to the fact we are using the content of https://cran.r-project.org/web/dbs/cran_info_db.rds to list CRAN releases.

So two actions must be done:

• fix the ordering of a package releases by using dates instead of version numbers
• investigate how to get info about the latest release of a package

moved from swh-web#4813 (moved)

mentioned in merge request !535 (closed)

mentioned in commit anlambert/swh-loader-core@3a7289de

mentioned in merge request swh-loader-core!533 (merged)

Nevertheless, it seems our CRAN lister only fetches releases that have been archived on CRAN and thus misses the latest version for each package, likely due to the fact we are using the content of https://cran.r-project.org/web/dbs/cran_info_db.rds to list CRAN releases.

So the real issue is that the cran_info_db.rds file is no longer updated since 2024-06-02 so our CRAN lister currently misses packages released since that day.

We need to update our CRAN lister implementation to rather exploit the METACRAN database instead which is up to date regarding package releases on CRAN.

mentioned in merge request !541

I have notified the CRAN, and I think they will fix the bug.

30/10/2024 15:16

The cran_info_db.rds file doesn't seem to be up to date since June (https://cran.r-project.org/web/dbs/).
Is it planned to be updated again or is it aborted?

01/11/2024 18:16 (Kurt Hornik, cran-sysadmin)

Many thanks for spotting this: we'll take a look.

The cran_info_db.rds is now up to date on the CRAN since 2024-11-10.

mentioned in commit anlambert/swh-loader-core@ab861fd0

mentioned in commit anlambert/swh-loader-core@555e4171

mentioned in commit anlambert/swh-loader-core@b773bc11