CRAN Policy Submission Lint

It reads an R package's DESCRIPTION, NAMESPACE and R source against 25 rules drawn from the CRAN Repository Policy and Writing R Extensions: Title case and trailing period, Description openings, licence specifications, one cre maintainer, development version numbers, library() in package code, setwd(), unrestored options() and par(), writes outside tempdir(), T and F, ::: and non-ASCII source.

R package authors submitting to CRAN for the first time, and maintainers who have received a CRAN email with an archival deadline and need to find every policy problem in one pass. It is equally aimed at people whose package code was drafted with an AI assistant, which reliably writes library() calls and T/F into package sources.

R CMD check finds what a program can compute: undocumented arguments, missing imports, broken examples. A large share of CRAN rejections are prose-policy judgements it never evaluates, such as a Description that opens with the package name, a bare MIT licence string, or a package that installs software. This linter reads exactly that layer.

Checking the file you have open is free forever, in the editor and in the browser tool, against all 25 rules with no cap on how often you run it. The licence covers the other axis: sweeping every file in the package at once and writing a dated report file you keep, attach to submission comments, or commit alongside the tarball.

A freelance R developer in North America bills fifty to a hundred dollars an hour according to Upwork's 2026 rate guidance, and a rejected submission costs a rework round trip plus another wait in the CRAN queue. The extension is twenty-nine dollars once, with a seven-day full refund.