Error Uploading "actuar" Package – PackageValidationException ("empty.author")

[VincentGuyader]

Hello,

I am encountering an issue when attempting to upload the "actuar" package using rdepot. The upload process fails and generates the following error message in the logs:

oa-rdepot-backend   | 2025-03-01 20:42:22.709 131524 [http-nio-8080-exec-4]  WARN traceId=071e1056-d119-4157-8633-216fa16190f0 o.h.e.i.StatefulPersistenceContext : HHH000179: Narrowing proxy to class eu.openanalytics.rdepot.r.entities.RRepository - this operation breaks ==
oa-rdepot-backend   | 2025-03-01 20:43:12.107 180922 [http-nio-8080-exec-9] ERROR traceId=1fd28fc9-0bfd-43b6-a468-d95fc8763ff4 e.o.r.b.s.u.DefaultPackageUploadStrategy : "empty.author"
oa-rdepot-backend   | eu.openanalytics.rdepot.base.validation.exceptions.PackageValidationException: "empty.author"

It appears that the issue is related to the absence of the "author" field in the package metadata, which triggers a PackageValidationException with the message "empty.author".

I was able to reproduce the issue by uploading the package directly from the URL below:

• actuar_3.3-5.tar.gz

Additionally, when attempting to sync using a more general CRAN mirror, the "actuar" package causes the entire synchronization process to fail. This suggests that it might be beneficial to implement a try-catch (or similar) mechanism during multiple package imports to prevent a single problematic package from stopping the entire process.

Best regards,

[jvanmalder]

Hi Vincent,

We were able to reproduce the issue with the actuar package and are working on a fix, which will be released in the next version of RDepot.
The issue here in particular, was the "Classification/MSC-2010" property in the DESCRIPTION file, since our properties parser didn't expect any digits in the names of the properties whereas the documentation on R DESCRIPTION files allows any ASCII character (so digits should be allowed).

Thank you for your suggestion to implement a try-catch mechanism during synchronization of mirrored packages, we will be looking into this.

We will keep you updated on the progress here.

Kind regards,
Jonas