R 和 libcurl4 在 Ubuntu 18.04 中几乎不能共存

Question

I have Ubuntu 18.04. I recently upgraded my R version from 3.2.3 to 3.6.3 . Upon reinstallation of the packages that I need, I stumbled upon an issue generated by httr and curl . Other posts, especially this (but also this and this ) have been written about similar (if not almost identical issues) but following them led me nowhere and my issue is still there.

I'm sorry in advance for the long post, but I think that other people will eventually stumble upon this issue so I want to be as complete as possible. Here's what happens.

I am trying to install a package that has httr among the dependencies. Since I need to reinstall it, I tried to do so from install.packages("httr") and from a local path (see example).

> install.packages("/home/schmat/Documents/Marti/packages/httr_1.4.1.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")
Installing package into ‘/home/schmat/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
ERROR: dependency ‘curl’ is not available for package ‘httr’

This showed me that curl is not available, so I tried to install curl the same way. Only to get this:

No package 'libcurl' found
Using PKG_CFLAGS=
Using PKG_LIBS=-lcurl
------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------
Configuration failed because libcurl was not found. Try installing:
 * deb: libcurl4-openssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
 * rpm: libcurl-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)
 * csw: libcurl_dev (Solaris)
If libcurl is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your
PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a libcurl.pc file. If pkg-config
is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via:
R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...'
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Since this showed that I needed to install libcurl4-openssl-dev , I tried to do it via apt install and I got:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libcurl4-openssl-dev : Depends: libcurl4 (= 7.58.0-2ubuntu3.8) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

So I tried to add the libcurl.pc file that I have to $PKG_CONFIG_PATH :

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/schmat/anaconda3/lib/pkgconfig/libcurl.pc

Without any result.

I tried the git clone approach suggested in this thread , without any success.

At this point, I tried to install libcurl4 from apt install . However, by doing so my R gets removed from the system. I reinstalled R (same version, 3.6.3) and this removes libcurl4 .

I am stuck in this loop where I can't get what I need because something else is missing, in a circle. How is that possible? How come, that an R package (latest version, March 26, 2020!) which ultimately needs some curl function cannot be installed, because curl cannot coexist with R/3.6.3 ?

Answer 1

It's incredible how, after days of trial and error, the very moment I decided to write a question here I also found the answer minutes later.

In one of the links I provided ( this ), OP mentions that he/she cleaned the /etc/apt/sources.list from "rubbish". It is not, however, declared which rubbish or how the file was edited.

what I did (and worked) for me was the following.

1. I edited the file (with sudo rights) changing the last two lines from:

deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial-cran35/
# deb-src https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial-cran35/

To:

deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/ bionic-cran35/
deb-src https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/ bionic-cran35/

Note that I changed "xenial" to "bionic", and I uncommented the last line.

3. Closed and re-opened the terminal.

4. Ran sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade .

5. Installed libcurl4 via sudo apt install -y libcurl4 . This still uninstalls R and its components.

6. Installed libcurl4-openssl-dev via sudo apt install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev .

7. Ran sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade .

8. Installed r-base via sudo apt install -y r-base . This time, libcurl4 is not uninstalled.

9. Run R , and install the package that I needed.