[R] R installation Ubuntu 18.04 missing dependency libreadline6

[John Kane]

 NOTE. This is a re-post of a message of Saturday 2018-03-03 sent with an incorrect header. 

To upgrade to R.3.5.2 from 3.4.4 I have been following the instructions at https://www.r-bloggers.com/installation-of-r-3-5-on-ubuntu-18-04-lts-and-tips-for-spatial-packages/ .

I seem to have the repository properly connected and verified.

I am getting an error: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- john using jonh-T510:~$ sudo apt install r-base r-base-core r-recommended Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies: r-base-core : Depends: libreadline6 (>= 6.0) but it is not installable Recommends: r-base-dev but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earlier I was getting another error r-base-core : Depends: libpng12-0 but it is not installable but that was cured by installing libpng12-0 via the Ubuntu Software app.

I cannot find what appears to be an installable version of libreadlines6.

Ubuntu reports that the up-to-date version of libreadlines7.

Should I consider this an R issue or an Ubuntu issue?

In any case, has anyone encountered the problem and beaten it?

Thanks