Bridge CRAN downtime periods

[HenrikBengtsson]

CRAN stops accepting submissions for approximately two weeks twice a year (see below). If a CRAN package gets archived before such a downtime and the maintainer does not get time to fix it in time, the archived package has to remain archived over also the CRAN Incoming downtime period. Also, after such downtimes, there is often a lot of package submissions immediately after CRAN comes back, which delays any unarchiving even further.

Because of this, CRANhaven could extend its 4-week limit, accounting for any such CRAN submission downtime periods. Ideally, this can be fully automated, but it's not clear it that can be done robustly, because the date information is often a manually written note on the CRAN submission page.

Some of the past submission-downtime events are:

• 2023-12-22 -- 2024-01-08
• 2023-07-21 -- 2023-08-07
• ...
• 2021-12-21 -- 2022-01-03
• ...
• 2019-08-09 -- 2019-08-18
• ...
• 2018-12-21 -- 2019-01-02
• ...
• 2017-12-22 -- 2018-01-03

[llrs]

I have been tracking this too: llrs/blogR#57.

Last December I sent an email asking for it to be posted on the mailing list (and not just the home page of CRAN).
The response I got is was they/he would try to post a message to r-package-devel.