Redraft CRAN Policy preamble

[MilesMcBain]

In our recent meeting we discussed CRAN's interest in taking steps toward more transparency and engagement (New website, Developer Advocate).

Something I think that would complement these moves is a redraft of the preamble to the CRAN policy document.

This is the preamble:

This document describes the policies in place for the R package repository hosted by the Comprehensive R Archive Network. In what follows, this CRAN package repository will be referred to as “CRAN”.

CRAN is maintained by the efforts of volunteers (the “CRAN team”) and the resources of the R Foundation and the employers of those volunteers (WU Wien, TU Dortmund, U Oxford, U Auckland). Having a package distributed by CRAN is subject to a set of policies, and submitting a package (including an update) to CRAN indicates agreement to these policies.

CRAN hosts packages of publication quality and is not a development platform. A package’s contribution has to be non-trivial.

Distributing code or documentation is subject to legal requirements, and CRAN operates in many jurisdictions. One of the aims of these policies is to ensure that the distributors meet their legal obligations of diligence without excessive work.

The time of the volunteers is CRAN’s most precious resource, and they reserve the right to remove or modify packages on CRAN without notice or explanation (although notification will usually be given).

All correspondence with CRAN must be sent to CRAN-submissions@R-project.org (for submissions) or CRAN@R-project.org (for published packages) and not to members of the team, in plain text ASCII and not HTML.

With this text, I think there are opportunities to be clearer about:

• What CRAN's objectives and roles are
• What kinds of works CRAN accepts
  • Although this probably deserves detailed treatment in the policy itself, especially relating to "publication quality" and "non-trivial"
• The benefits derived from submission to CRAN
• Others?

[MilesMcBain]

Perhaps also:

• What maintainers need to commit to in order to maintain their work on CRAN