Hi all, The thread seems to have drifted off topic. I really didn't want this to devolve into a discussion about when cat() or message() is more appropriate — I have complete faith in Jenny Bryan's ability to understand technical tradeoffs and pick the most appropriate given the constraints. I am most interested in understanding what level of discretion CRAN's "Studentischer administrativer Mitarbeiter" have to critique the implementation of R packages, particularly for packages that do not yield R CMD check problems or otherwise violate CRAN policies.
I mean no disrespect towards the CRAN maintainers (whose tireless efforts are a crucial part of making R the success that it is), but I don't think it's unreasonable to enquire as to who is involved in a crucial piece of open source community infrastructure, and, if students are involved, what their scope of work is and how they are trained and supervised. I do recognise that my question "Who are they?" may have been perceived as overly intrusive. To clarify: I don't want to know names or other personally identifying information, but I would like to know in general terms how many there are, and what backgrounds they have. Similarly, I don't want to know how much they are paid, just whether or not they are volunteers or employees. Hadley On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Several people on my team have received responses to their CRAN > submissions from new members of the CRAN team who appear to be student > assistants (judging from their job titles: "Studentischer > administrativer Mitarbeiter"). From the outside, they appear to be > exercising editorial control[^1] and conducting design reviews[^2]. > > CRAN is a critical piece of R community infrastructure, and I am sure > these students have been surrounded by the proper checks and balances, > but it's not obvious what their role is from the outside. I'd really > appreciate knowing a little more about them: > > * Who are they? > > * Are they paid employees or volunteers? > > * What is their scope of work? > > * How are they trained? > > * If we believe that they have made a mistake, how do we request > review from a senior CRAN member? > > * They appear to be able to apply additional discretionary criteria > that are not included in R CMD check or documented in the CRAN policies. > Is this true? If so, what is the scope of these additional checks? > > Hadley > > [^1]: The devoid package was rejected because the student assistant > did not understand the purpose of the package. > > [^2]: The gargle package was rejected because the student assistant > believed that the use of cat() was incorrect. It was not. > > -- > http://hadley.nz -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
