February 7, 2023 From rOpenSci (https://deploy-preview-488--ropensci.netlify.app/blog/2023/02/07/runiverse-registry-repo/). Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the CC-BY license.
Tiny update for r-universe users who run their own package registry: we have changed the preferred git repo name where you host your packages.json registry file.
Previously the git repository was simply called universe, i.e. the registry for tiledb-inc.r-universe.dev was in the GitHub repository TileDB-Inc/universe. We now recommend to instead use the full lowercase name of your r-universe domain as the repo name, i.e TileDB-Inc/tiledb-inc.r-universe.dev.
The old name universe will keep working as well, so this should not break any existing registries, but we recommend renaming it.
Why the change? First of all, the old name universe was too generic, which made its purpose sometimes unclear for larger GitHub organizations.
But there was also a potential bug: if you forked somebody’s universe repo in order to send them a PR, you would automatically have a git repo named universe under your own GitHub account, which could unintentionally start a CRAN-like repo under your own name, with their packages.
Hence the obvious solution was to use the same format as github-pages, where the name of the repo is simply the full domain name at which your universe is hosted.
