R devel - Nov 2015 - R-devel no longer supports Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (insufficient PCRE version)

Since yesterday's r69662, R no longer ./configure[s] on a standard
Ubuntu 14.04.3 installation, which ships with PCRE 8.31
(http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty-updates/libpcre3-dev)

I get:
> checking if PCRE version >= 8.32, < 10.0 and has UTF-8 support... no
> checking whether PCRE support suffices... configure: error: pcre library
and headers are required
Are there any workarounds for this except for manually compiling and
installing a more recent version of PCRE from source?

Thanks!

	Sebastian


-- 
University of Zurich
Sebastian Meyer
Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute
(Department of Biostatistics)
Hirschengraben 84
CH-8001 Z?rich
Tel: +41 44 63-45485
Fax: +41 44 63-44386
www.biostat.uzh.ch
sebastian.meyer at uzh.ch

On 20 November 2015 at 16:14, Sebastian Meyer wrote:
| Since yesterday's r69662, R no longer ./configure[s] on a standard
| Ubuntu 14.04.3 installation, which ships with PCRE 8.31
| (http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty-updates/libpcre3-dev)
| 
| I get:
| 
| > checking if PCRE version >= 8.32, < 10.0 and has UTF-8 support...
no
| > checking whether PCRE support suffices... configure: error: pcre library
and headers are required
| 
| Are there any workarounds for this except for manually compiling and
| installing a more recent version of PCRE from source?

The technical term is 'backport'. You could try and see if someone has
taken
the (Debian or Ubuntu) source package for pcre (current, ie >= 8.32) and
created a package on launchpad.net in a PPA.

Otherwise it is pretty easy to do yourself ... and if you just wait a little
Michael will have to do it anyway to get R 3.3 built for 14.04.

(I was just bitten yesterday by R 3.2.2 re-built for Ubuntu 12.04 [ as used
by Travis ] not having libcurl capabilities. But that may well be a more
involved library than pcre so I left it at that.)

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org

I think you have it backwards: Ubuntu 14.04 does not support R-devel ....

PCRE 8.32 is 3 years old, so Ubuntu 14.04 shipped an already quite old 
version 19 months ago.

R has long said that its requirement was

    PCRE (version 8.10 or later, preferably 8.32 or later)

and 8.32 is indeed preferable: the aim is that all the current PCRE 
regex syntax be usable on all platforms.

Given that you appear to be installing R from the sources, PCRE is no 
more difficult to install from source ....

R-devel is 'under development' and months off release: if this proves to
be too restrictive we can postpone the aim to 3.4.x.


On 20/11/2015 15:14, Sebastian Meyer wrote:
> Since yesterday's r69662, R no longer ./configure[s] on a standard
> Ubuntu 14.04.3 installation, which ships with PCRE 8.31
> (http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty-updates/libpcre3-dev)
>
> I get:
>
>> checking if PCRE version >= 8.32, < 10.0 and has UTF-8 support...
no
>> checking whether PCRE support suffices... configure: error: pcre
library and headers are required
>
> Are there any workarounds for this except for manually compiling and
> installing a more recent version of PCRE from source?
>
> Thanks!
>
> 	Sebastian
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK

For the record ...

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 too (probably until 16.04 comes out)

Paul

On 21/11/15 10:39, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> I think you have it backwards: Ubuntu 14.04 does not support R-devel ....
>
> PCRE 8.32 is 3 years old, so Ubuntu 14.04 shipped an already quite old
> version 19 months ago.
>
> R has long said that its requirement was
>
>     PCRE (version 8.10 or later, preferably 8.32 or later)
>
> and 8.32 is indeed preferable: the aim is that all the current PCRE
> regex syntax be usable on all platforms.
>
> Given that you appear to be installing R from the sources, PCRE is no
> more difficult to install from source ....
>
> R-devel is 'under development' and months off release: if this
proves to
> be too restrictive we can postpone the aim to 3.4.x.
>
>
> On 20/11/2015 15:14, Sebastian Meyer wrote:
>> Since yesterday's r69662, R no longer ./configure[s] on a standard
>> Ubuntu 14.04.3 installation, which ships with PCRE 8.31
>> (http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty-updates/libpcre3-dev)
>>
>> I get:
>>
>>> checking if PCRE version >= 8.32, < 10.0 and has UTF-8
support... no
>>> checking whether PCRE support suffices... configure: error: pcre
>>> library and headers are required
>>
>> Are there any workarounds for this except for manually compiling and
>> installing a more recent version of PCRE from source?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>>     Sebastian
>>
>>
>
>
-- 
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/