Pulled from CRAN

[sneumann]

Hi, CRAN says https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/metabolighteR/index.html

Package ‘metabolighteR’ was removed from the CRAN repository.
Archived on 2022-11-21 for policy violation

What was the cause, and what'd be needed to get it back ?
Yours, Steffen

P.S.: I saw https://cran-archive.r-project.org/web/checks/2022/2022-11-21_check_results_metabolighteR.html
which says

get_studies()
    Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) :
     Could not resolve host: www.ebi.ac.uk
    Execution halted 

and I am sure EBI still exists, so does not look like a road-blocker.

[wilsontom]

Hi Steffan,

I think this issue was that every now and then when the daily package tests ran on the CRAN server, the mtbls server would unreachable due to maintenance. I was thinking about moving the package on to bioconductor, but for now I'll change the examples/tests to skip so it should prevent this from happening.

Will get it submitted back to CRAN this week.

Thanks

Tom

[romanzenka]

It does not seem to be on CRAN.

I am a bit nervous about testing directly against a live website. Would it be possible to scrape the responses from the website and then fake them for test purposes? That way you would have documentation of what the web used to do, way to see what it does now, CRAN would not be reaching across the world and tests would succeed reliably?

[kjemist]

Hey!

I see this is still not available on CRAN.
Are there any more future plans for this package?

[sneumann]

Hi @romanzenka , that's a great idea ! Does CRAN allow tests to return a warning ?
Then the online test could be wrapped in try() and an error be downgraded to Warning,
so we still have an inkling if sth changes online. Yours, Steffen

[romanzenka]

Does CRAN allow tests to return a warning ? Then the online test could be wrapped in try() and an error be downgraded to Warning, so we still have an inkling if sth changes online. Yours, Steffen

I am thinking that this is not something CRAN should bother with - I would want my CRAN package to test robustly, without the vagaries of the internet, otherwise you are not testing your own work, but someone else's server.

I would probably wrap that sort of test into some sort of internal function, and I'd run it on my own somewhere outside of CRAN, just to see how well is a given service performing over time. I would publish this package as: "assuming EBI works as it worked on <date>, this package will work".