[R-pkg-devel] Checking for future file timestamps - warning with worldclockapi HTTP status 403 Site Disabled

[Ralf Herold]

Dear All, 

Checking a new package under development produces a warning in a local R-devel MS Windows environment (output below). 

Building it with R-devel on Travis fails (because warnings are changed to errors), but is successful when setting environment variable _R_CHECK_SYSTEM_CLOCK_ to zero. 

No issue occurs when checking and building with R-stable and R-oldrel on Travis, or with any R version on win-builder.r-project.org. 

The warning concerns using http://worldclockapi.com/, which however seems out of service ("The web app you have attempted to reach is currently stopped and does not accept any requests."). This is referenced in the main function for R CMD check (https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/tools/R/check.R) and may concern more R-devel than R-package-devel. I am posting here to check if the issue was noticed by other package developers and to check the impact. 

Thanks for any suggestions. 
Best regards,
Ralf


PS C:\Users\username> & 'C:\Program Files\R\R-devel\bin\R.exe' CMD check E:\mypackage_0.1.2.3.tar.gz --as-cran
* using log directory 'C:/Users/username/ctrdata.Rcheck'
* using R Under development (unstable) (2019-03-05 r76200)
* using platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32 (64-bit)
* using session charset: ISO8859-1
* using option '--as-cran'
[...]
* checking package directory ... OK
* checking for future file timestamps ...Warning in file(con, "r") :
  cannot open URL 'http://worldclockapi.com/api/json/utc/now': HTTP status was '403 Site Disabled'
 WARNING
unable to verify current time
* checking 'build' directory … OK
[...]



 ## Ralf Herold 
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