Add cran-status-check workflow (#7175)

* Add cran-status-check workflow

Fix #7008

Supersedes #7020

* Add NOTE in NEWS for this change

* Exit early to reduce nesting

* Add link to workflow run in issue body

* nit: consistent spacing around status emoji

* simplify (IMO)

* use subset() to avoid temp crandb

---------

Co-authored-by: Michael Chirico <[email protected]>

Author: Bisaloo

.github/workflows/cran-status-check.yaml

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+on:
+  workflow_dispatch:
+  schedule:
+    - cron: '0 6 * * 1,3,5' # Runs at 06:00 on Mon/Wed/Fri
+
+name: check-cran-status
+
+jobs:
+  fetch-deadlines:
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    env:
+      GITHUB_PAT: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
+    permissions:
+      issues: write
+    steps:
+      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
+
+      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2
+        with:
+          use-public-rspm: true
+
+      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r-dependencies@v2
+        with:
+          packages: |
+            gh
+            glue
+
+      - name: Check for existing CRAN issues
+        id: check-issues
+        env:
+          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
+        run: |
+          # Count open issues with CRAN-related labels
+          ISSUE_COUNT=$(gh issue list --label "cran-deadline" --state open --json number | jq length)
+          if [ $ISSUE_COUNT -eq 0 ]; then
+            echo "should-run=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
+            echo "✅ Will run CRAN check"
+          else
+            echo "should-run=false" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
+            echo "⏭️ Skipping CRAN check - existing issues found"
+          fi
+
+      - name: Fetch deadline for this package
+        if: steps.check-issues.outputs.should-run == 'true'
+        shell: Rscript {0}
+        run: |
+          pkgname <- drop(read.dcf("DESCRIPTION", "Package"))
+
+          deadline <- subset(tools::CRAN_package_db(), Package == pkgname, "Deadline", drop=TRUE)
+
+          if (is.na(deadline)) {
+            quit()
+          }
+
+          gh::gh(
+            "POST /repos/{owner_repo}/issues",
+            owner_repo = Sys.getenv("GITHUB_REPOSITORY"),
+            title = paste("Fix CRAN R CMD check issues by", deadline),
+            body = glue::glue(
+              "This package is failing CRAN checks and is at risk of archival.",
+              "https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_{pkgname}.html",
+              "This issue was opened by https://github.com/{Sys.getenv('GITHUB_REPOSITORY')}/actions/runs/{Sys.getenv('GITHUB_RUN_ID')}.",
+              .sep = "\n\n"
+            ),
+            labels = list("cran-deadline")
+          )

NEWS.md

@@ -103,6 +103,8 @@
 
 4. The default `format_list_item()` method (and hence `print.data.table()`) annotates truncated list items with their length, [#605](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/605). Thanks Matt Dowle for the original report (2012!) and @MichaelChirico for the fix.
 
+5. A GitHub Actions workflow is now in place to warn the entire maintainer team, as well as any contributor following the GitHub repository, when the package is at risk of archival on CRAN [#7008](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/7008). Thanks @tdhock for the original report and @Bisaloo and @TysonStanley for the fix.
+
 # data.table [v1.17.8](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/milestone/41) (6 July 2025)
 
 1. Internal functions used to signal errors are now marked as non-returning, silencing a compiler warning about potentially unchecked allocation failure. Thanks to Prof. Brian D. Ripley for the report and @aitap for the fix, [#7070](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/pull/7070).