Use CRAN's Archive

[rgaiacs]

Most, if not all, of the recipes for R packages uses a URL that like https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz. For example,

recipes/recipes/recipes_emscripten/r-dplyr/recipe.yaml

Line 11 in 03b7e0f

- https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz

and

recipes/recipes/recipes_emscripten/r-yaml/recipe.yaml

Line 11 in 03b7e0f

- https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz

The problem with this URL is that it is only valid for the latest release of a R package. For example, before 24 March 2026 the URL https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/fs_1.6.6.tar.gz was valid but now it returns 404 not found.

To make recipes more resilient, I would like to change the URL from

https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz

to

https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/${{ name[2:] }}/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz

@IsabelParedes what do you think?

[IsabelParedes]

Hi @rgaiacs !

I think it's a good idea to make it more resilient. Replacing the existing url with the Archive url will not work because the Archive url does not include the latest releases. But, we can use the Archive url as a backup url and that should work for all the versions. This is what is done in r-htmltools and r-glue.

recipes/recipes/recipes_emscripten/r-htmltools/recipe.yaml

Lines 9 to 14 in b5fdc21

	source:
	url:
	- https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz
	- https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/${{ name[2:] }}/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz
	- https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/${{ name[2:] }}_${{ version }}.tar.gz
	sha256: 19308618da485818f69dcfeeadd2ddc81d43a736a74519df7b3fd98e13128afd