R SIG Debian - Aug 2021 - Configure error: checking if libcurl supports https... no --- slight update.

On Sun, 29 Aug 2021 07:42:08 -0500
Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> On 29 August 2021 at 08:06, Michael Mahoney wrote:
> | Forgive me if I'm missing something here, but do you need to install
> | from source or do you just need R 4.1.0?
> | 
> | If the latter, my understanding is that you should be able to get R
> | version 4.1.0 on Ubuntu distributions via:
> 
> An even easier alternative is to just run a pre-made Docker version,
> and then run your local package tests in that.
Sounds like a Good Idea, but oh God.  It's daunting.  I have no idea
what Docker is, or how to use it ....

Did some web searching, and found *some* instructions.  Started off by
looking at the instructions for installing Docker on Ubuntu.  Did the
update step and the set-up-repository step.  That seemed to go OK.

Then I came to the "Add Docker?s official GPG key:" step.  Issued the
specified command
> curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg
> --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
And of course all hell broke loose.  Since curl is involved.  I got:
> curl: /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4: no version information available
(required by curl)
> curl: symbol lookup error: curl: undefined symbol: curl_mime_free, version
CURL_OPENSSL_4
> gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
So I'm back to the fact that my system is stuffed w.r.t. curl, but I
have no idea how to track down what's wrong. :-(

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

...
> > curl: /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4: no version information available
so here we have evidence that indeed you have a locally compiled curl version 
on your system in addition to the Ubuntu one (which would not put anything 
into /usr/local/lib).

So it seems that at some point you have downloaded curl sources and installed 
them into your system, and that this version (as it has no https support) got 
in the way configuring R 4.1.0.

If you still have the sources lying around, there is an uninstall target in 
the Makefile, so you should go to the source directory and do a

sudo make uninstall

to get rid of your local curl version in /usr/local/.

Johannes

Hi All,

I just thought I'd let you know that I've tried a couple of other
things.  No real progress, but.

(1) In respect of just-plain-curl: to make the issue clearer, I tried

    curl --version

and got:
> > curl: /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4: no version information available
> > (required by curl)
> curl: symbol lookup error: curl: undefined symbol: curl_mime_free,
> version CURL_OPENSSL_4
I found that there was another, apparently newer, version of
libcurl.so.4 in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.  I realised that I did
not have /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu in my LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  So I put it
into that path (*before* /usr/local/lib) and "curl --version" now
seems to be OK and gives:
> curl 7.68.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f
> zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0
> (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0
> librtmp/2.3 Release-Date: 2020-01-08 Protocols: dict file ftp ftps
> gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp
> sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp Features: AsynchDNS brotli
> GSS-API HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz NTLM
> NTLM_WB PSL SPNEGO SSL TLS-SRP UnixSockets  
which verbose, but I guess that's alright.

(2) In respect of libcurl and https:

I did a web search on "libcurl >= 7.28.0 library and headers are
required" and after much thrashing around found what looked like a
useful hit at https://www.xspdf.com/help/51318770.html .

The problem(s) described are exactly the same as mine.  Different
correspondents report different results; one person said that
installing libcurl4-openssl-dev solved the problem, another said that
it didn't but that libcurl4-gnutls-dev did work.

It was nice to know that I am not alone, but neither of the foregoing
solutions worked for me.  Then another correspondent suggested that the
problem might be with the gcc variant.  I thought that this was
promising.

I found that my gcc version was 9.3.0.  I found that the latest version
seemed to be 11.2, so I tried to upgrade.  The process seemed to be
endlessly complicated but I eventually got a new version such that

   gcc --version

gives "(Ubuntu 11.1.0-1ubuntu1~20.04) 11.1.0".  (11.1 not 11.2 ??? Oh,
well.)

But then I tried the configure step again, with the new gcc in place,
and got the same old error.  Story of my life.

I'm going mad, *mad* I tell you!!! :-)

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276