Steps to reproduce

I am not sure if this is a R problem or a general one but I only encountered it for R packages so far.

It seems that R packages which have a newer version on cran (for bioconductor I did not check) cannot be built due to missing sources. This only affects packages where the sources are not yet in the spack mirror.

E.g. r-cli:

Package in spack: version 3.1.1
newest version on cran: 3.2.0 (see PR #29005)

When installing

$ spack install r-cli
==> Installing r-cli-3.1.1-xncfrt777mkotgp7lncpsf7pxrdurqjz
==> No binary for r-cli-3.1.1-xncfrt777mkotgp7lncpsf7pxrdurqjz found: installing from source
==> Error: FetchError: All fetchers failed for spack-stage-r-cli-3.1.1-xncfrt777mkotgp7lncpsf7pxrdurqjz

I could reproduce this for r-rlang (open PR #29040).

For packages like r-foreach (PR #29062) where there is a newer version on cran but the old sources are already in the mirror this problem does not occur.

Additional examples:

no mirror -> fail:
r-future
r-jsonlite
r-quantreg
r-tinytex
r-yaml

mirror -> work:
r-colorspace
r-clipr
r-crayon
r-evaluate
r-generics

Disabling the spack mirror results in all of these to fail as well.

Possible reason:
New packages are found under in this casehttps://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/ and are moved to https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ [2] once a newer release is available. If the newest version in spack is not equal to the newest version on cran, spack looks in [1] although the sources can now only be found in [2].

This is similar to the spack checksum issues in #26977

Side note:
I found two outlier: r-glue and r-mgcv:
https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/glue_1.6.1.tar.gz and https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/mgcv_1.8-38.tar.gz still work although there is a newer version on cran.

ping @glennpj @adamjstewart @bernhardkaindl

Error message

No response

Information on your system

• Spack: 0.17.1-1357-d62b8f0bf3
• Python: 3.8.10
• Platform: linux-fedora32-haswell
• Concretizer: clingo

General information

• I have run spack debug report and reported the version of Spack/Python/Platform
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe this is not a duplicate
• I have run the failing commands in debug mode and reported the output