Dear all, I'm trying to learn a bit about the CRAN history and how it is operated. I was looking at the source code of the tools package and found in CRANtools.R some internal functions retrieving files accessible outside CRAN such as tools:::CRAN_archive_db(). There is a lot of information there, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. I would appreciate it if someone could help regarding this. For example, that file archive.rds has a list with the file.info information of the packages archived. I see they match the date on the websites such as https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/leaps/ But in other files (tools:::CRAN_current_db) the date matches the publication date as shown in tools:::CRAN_package_db. Are these dates (mtime) when the package was published or when the package was archived? These files also report a user name, does it mean that the user archived or made the final decision to accept the package (and may or may be not involved with archiving it)? I received mails from some people at the CRAN team managing some submissions that do not seem to appear on the files. Similarly, I see user names of people that as far as I know are not in the CRAN team. I'm also thinking about how often these files are updated. Are these files updated daily at a fixed schedule or is the process more complex? I take the opportunity to thank Uwe Ligges, Kurt Hornik and Brian Ripley for all your dedication to CRAN and I look forward to the next 20 years of CRAN success. Best wishes, Llu?s PS: I only found a mention of this function in the list in the past https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-February/073811.html but I didn't find other mentions in the archives.