[Rd] Installation using iconv from glibc

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 15/05/2015 01:19, Smith, Virgil wrote:
> The R Installation and Administration manual section A.1 states that glibc should provide a suitable iconv function, but I can't get R's configure script to accept/validate iconv on a Linux platform I need to support using glibc 2.20.
>
> Is glibc is actually compatible (and/or is gnu libiconv essentially the only path)?

R is built daily on Fedora 21 Linux which uses glibc 2.20 and has been 
for at least a decade with that and earlier versions of glibc.  No 
problems with installing using glibc have been reported in all that time 
(and many dialects of Linux have been used successfully).

> If glibc should work, what should I check to troubleshoot my environment?
>
> The configure error I get is
>      checking iconv.h usability... yes
>      checking iconv.h presence... yes
>      checking for iconv.h... yes
>      checking for iconv... yes
>      checking whether iconv accepts "UTF-8", "latin1", "ASCII" and "UCS-*"... no
>      configure: error: a suitable iconv is essential

You look in config.log for the details we cannot even guess at.

>
> My full list of installed glibc / libc packages is
>      glibc-binary-localedata-en-gb - 2.20-r0
>      glibc-binary-localedata-en-us - 2.20-r0
>      glibc-gconv - 2.20-r0
>      glibc-gconv-utf-16 - 2.20-r0
>      glibc-locale-en-gb - 2.20-r0
>      libc6 - 2.20-r0
>      libc6-dev - 2.20-r0
>      libc6-extra-nss - 2.20-r0
>      libc6-thread-db - 2.20-r0
>
> This is for a custom Linux build, not a major distro, so unfortunately I cannot use pre-packaged configurations.



-- 
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