CRAN warning: {futile.logger} set to be archived

[jameslamb]

Description

Received the following email from CRAN today.

We have repeatedly asked for an update fixing the check problems shown
on https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_futile.logger.html
with no reply from the maintainer thus far.

Thus, package futile.logger is now scheduled for archival on
2026-01-29, and archiving this will necessitate also archiving its CRAN
strong reverse dependencies.

Please negotiate the necessary actions.

Best wishes,
The CRAN Team

Let's factor out {futile.logger} and do a new release to CRAN.

Benefits of this work

• keeps {pkgnet} on CRAN

Acceptance criteria

• {pkgnet} does not depend on {futile.logger}

Approach

Factor out that library.

Notes

We won't actually be able to submit to CRAN until January 7th. From https://cran.r-project.org/ ...

CRAN submission will be closed Dec 23, 2025 to Jan 7, 2026 (CRAN team vacation and maintenance work).

We need to do this in {uptasticsearch} too (uptake/uptasticsearch#259) 🙃

[jayqi]

Seems like this might be a good replacement candidate: https://daroczig.github.io/logger/

[jameslamb]

Looks like that would pull in a lot of Suggests: dependencies, even {shiny} (!!)

Personally I think we should just stop using third-party logging libraries here and do what we can with cat(), message(), print(), and warning(). {pkgnet}'s logging needs are pretty simple and I think they could be satisfied by some mix of those things from the standard library. That'd also reduce the risk of something like this happening again in the future.

[jameslamb]

In case we want to borrow from it, here's what I'm proposing over in {uptasticsearch}: uptake/uptasticsearch#260