[R] problem with RCurl 0.8-1 installation on Debian Etch

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Christian,

On 16 October 2007 at 15:39, Christian Kohler wrote:
| Dear R-Users,
| 
| I am having some trouble getting an installation of RCurl 0.8-1 to work
| properly on a Debian (Etch) machine.
| 
| 
| The command 'R CMD INSTALL RCurl_0.8-1.tar.gz'  yields the following error:
| 
| Installing *source* package 'RCurl' ...
| checking for curl-config... no
| Cannot find curl-config
| ERROR: configuration failed for package 'RCurl'
| 
| I do know that a file is missing (curl-config) but where to get it from?

That's basically always the same on Debian and Ubuntu (and to some degree on
RH et al):  Just because you have the __run-time__ library does not mean you
also have the __development__ package.

| I installed the latest 'curl' and 'libcurl3' packages via apt-get install.
| Furthermore, I crawled various mailing-lists to get my problem solved,
| but without being lucky.
| 
| Do I miss mandatory packages that go beyond those two mentioned above?

Yes:

edd at ron:~> apt-cache search libcurl3-dev
libcurl4-openssl-dev - Development files and documentation for libcurl (OpenSSL)


That's package you want.  [ Curl is a little tricky because it has two dev
packages for TLS and OpenSSL; you probably want this one. ]


Also the r-sig-debian list is a great venue for Debian/Ubuntu-specific R
question.  

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.