There is some discussion of CRAN categories here; it would be a good idea to take a look at the cran_incoming documentation and see if it's still accurate ...
this is a bit tricky since the documentation on the dashboard comes from an official, authoritative, source: the R journal [1].
"pending: if a decision is pending a response from the package maintainer: If an additional issue was present in the package that we cannot check for in the incoming checks (such as the BLAS issues mentioned in the section above), the maintainer is automatically asked whether these issues have been fixed. Same is true for change of maintainer (or maintainer's mail address) where the old maintainer (old address) is automatically asked to confirm the maintainer change. The answers have to be processed manually."
As Dirk explains and as reported in https://github.com/lockedata/cransays/issues/29, it is likely not true anymore but in the absence of further official information, it is difficult to issue a fix.
A later issue of the R journal [2] introduces the "waiting" and "newbies" categories but does not expand on the new role of "pending".
Best,
Hugo
[1]: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2018-1/cran.pdf
[2]: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2019-1/cran.pdf
There is some discussion of CRAN categories here; it would be a good idea to take a look at the
cran_incoming
documentation and see if it's still accurate ...