CRAN volunteers document since ~2009 why they archive packages. This function retrieves the data and prepares it for analysis, classifying the actions taken by the team per package and date.
Value
A data.frame with four columns: package, comment, date and action.
NA if not able to collect the data from CRAN.
Details
The comments are slightly edited: multiple comments for the same action are joined together so that they can be displayed on a single line. Actions are inferred from 7 keywords: archived, orphaned, removed, renamed, replaced, unarchived, unorphaned.
Note
There can be room for improvement: some comments describe two actions, please let me know if you think this can be improved. Other actions can be described on multiple comments/lines or out of order. Compare with the original file in case of doubts.
References
Original file: https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.in
See also
Other meta info from CRAN:
cran_alias(),
cran_archive(),
cran_history(),
cran_links()
Examples
# \donttest{
cc <- cran_comments()
#> Retrieving comments, this might take a bit.
#> Caching results to be faster next call in this session.
head(cc)
#> package
#> 1 A3
#> 2 ABCExtremes
#> 3 ABCp2
#> 4 ABCp2
#> 5 ACCLMA
#> 6 ACD
#> comment
#> 1 Archived on 2025-06-13 as issues were not corrected despite reminders.
#> 2 Archived on 2015-06-19 as incomplete maintainer address was not corrected despite reminders.
#> 3 Archived on 2015-07-01 as maintainer address <duryea@dartmouth.edu> bounced.
#> 4 Archived on 2025-01-26 as issues were not corrected despite reminders.
#> 5 Archived on 2021-02-05 as issues were not corrected despite reminders: 'xtfrm()' on data frames.
#> 6 Archived on 2022-06-08 as check problems were not corrected despite reminders.
#> date action
#> 1 2025-06-13 archived
#> 2 2015-06-19 archived
#> 3 2015-07-01 archived
#> 4 2025-01-26 archived
#> 5 2021-02-05 archived
#> 6 2022-06-08 archived
# }