Report on CRAN submission downtimes(?)

[HenrikBengtsson]

Would it be worth to have a banner on cranhaven.org that relays any CRAN submission downtimes?

Here's one way to extract the information, but I'm not sure if that is stable over time:

$ curl -s https://cran.r-project.org/banner.shtml | xmllint --html --xpath "//h2[. = 'Submitting to CRAN ']/following-sibling::node()" - | xmllint --html --xpath '//p[contains(., "vacation") or contains(., "maintenance")]' -
<p><font color="#990000">
 CRAN submission will be offline from Dec 23, 2024 to Jan 07, 2025
 (CRAN team vacation and maintenance work).
</font></p>

Maybe a better solution would be to ask CRAN to host a parsable file for this. Here's an example using an ISO-8601 date range:

$ curl -s https://cran.r-project.org/calendar
submission-maintenance: 2024-12-23/2024-01-07

[llrs]

I asked them a while back to post to r-packages-devel or any mailing list but I think habits are hard to change. But maybe a different file that gets automatically displayed on the index.html might be easier for them.

The one liner is a good approach, I might take for a bot account to report it automatically, instead of check it manually on December and July.

[HenrikBengtsson]

Observation on 2024-01-07T17:50Z: https://cran.r-project.org/submit.html is open again. Not sure if they opened one day early, or "to Jan 07, 2025" means re-opening on that day.

Another note: Looking at CRAN incoming, there's a package that was submitted on 2024-01-07T10:34+01:00, so, they re-opened by at least then.