R-devel: R CMD check failing because of… time? ("unable to verify current time")

[jemus42]

My travis builds on R-devel have been failing recently and I was wondering what was going on, but couldn't find anything related when googling around.

The gist: R CMD check seems to rely on an external API to verify the current time now, and said API seems to be hosted on an azure instance and is currently either over capacity (which would be pretty early in the month I guess) or down for some other reason.

Relevant excerpt from the log:

[…]
* 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 Forbidden'
 WARNING
unable to verify current time
* checking ‘build’ directory ... OK
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
[…]

(full log here)

I also checked the r-devel NEWS to see if they're doing things with R CMD check, but nothing regarding time verification is mentioned.

So I'm wondering what's going on there. I'm assuming it's just a devel-fluke and probably fixed soon, but well, I'm prepping for a CRAN release and builds failing (because of things I have no control over) is kind of making me nervous.

[aravind]

This issue seems to be there only on Travis but not on the R-devel version of Win Builder. Did you test your package on Win Builder? I just submitted a package yesterday and it seemed to work fine.

[jimhester]

This has now been "fixed" in R-devel.

[maelle]

I found the related R-package-devel thread interesting, so I'm posting the link https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2019q1/003577.html even if as @jimhester says the issue has now been solved.