Due to one of my current projects, R developers have been sharing their frustrations with CRAN with me. There are many distrubing aspects to these stories, but one that is on loop in my brain at the moment is the systemic degradation CRAN policies are creating.

I think this degradation is slow and doesn’t impact too much on functionality, so it will be hard to spot at first. If there is a trend though, over time its corrosive nature will become sorely apparent. This is because developers have confessed to:

• removing all external links from documentation to avoid being flagged when one of those becomes a redirect.
• deleting examples from their code that were being run even though they were flagged with \donttest.
• suppressing tests on CRAN that were creating issues that could not be easily reproduced
• ditching vignettes that were struggling to build on CRAN

It’s kind of sad to imagine what the cumulative effect looks like of developers being nudged away from creating thoroughly tested works with rich interconnected explanatory documentation. To me, it’s just an odd situation to be in: where R itself contains excellent tools for this, but our package infrastructure is having a potentially out-sized influence on the utilisation of those tools.