WARNING: This is work under development! Please do not rely on it
for production and do not add CRANhaven to Additional_repositories
of your package.
The CRANhaven R package repository, available on R-universe, hosts packages that were recently archived on CRAN. Those packages can be installed using:
options(repos = c(getOption("repos"), "https://cranhaven.r-universe.dev"))
install.packages("somepkg")Packages remain on CRANhaven for up to five weeks, or until they are unarchived on CRAN.
Sometimes a package gets archived only because the maintainer did not have time to address the issues before the deadline given by CRAN. Sometimes the deadline is as short as two weeks.
The impact of a CRAN package being archived depends on the package, and how widely used it is, and how many packages depend on it. In some cases it can be rather disruptive for R users and developers when one or more packages are archived on CRAN.
Importantly, any package that has a hard dependency (e.g. Depends:
and Imports:) on an archived package will automatically be archived
too. There is little a developer that is a "victim" of this can do,
other than doing a major rewrite, which is only reasonable to do if
the developer knows that the archived package will not be fixed
anytime soon.
The purpose of this R package repository is to give archived CRAN packages a second chance. As soon as the package is archived on CRAN, it is added to this repository. If the packages is fixed and "unarchived" on CRAN, it is removed from this repository. If the package is not unarchived on CRAN within five weeks, it is removed from this repository. This gives R users, developers, and reverse-dependency maintainers some extra leeway.
Some of the CRANhaven packages fail to build temporarily only because they depend on another archived CRAN package, which still has not been built on CRANhaven. This will normally resolve itself after a few hours; R-universe re-synchronize once an hour and it might require a few rounds for all packages to be built.
The "Commit" datestamps seen on CRANhaven show the dates (±1 day) when the packages were archived on CRAN.