[R-sig-Debian] r-base installation fails on Ubuntu 14.04

[Barnet Wagman]

Problems are showing up with libgfortran3 and liblapack3.
Results of apt-cache policy are below.  FYI no part of R is currently 
installed on my system.  Thanks.

root at bwud:/etc/apt# apt-get install r-base-core

...

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  r-base-core : Depends: libgfortran3 (>= 4.3) but it is not going to be 
installed
                Depends: liblapack3 but it is not going to be installed or
                         liblapack.so.3
                Recommends: r-recommended but it is not going to be 
installed
                Recommends: r-base-dev but it is not going to be installed


root at bwud:/etc/apt# apt-cache policy libgfortran3
libgfortran3:
   Installed: (none)
   Candidate: 4.8.2-19ubuntu1
   Version table:
      4.8.2-19ubuntu1 0
         500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

root at bwud:/etc/apt# apt-cache policy liblapack3
liblapack3:
   Installed: (none)
   Candidate: 3.5.0-2ubuntu1
   Version table:
      3.5.0-2ubuntu1 0
         500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages


On 03/23/2016 11:06 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> On 23 March 2016 at 10:35, Alex M wrote:
> | I can make a few suggestions to help you hunt for the issue. This kind
> | of error is often caused by conflicting packages from proposed,
> | backports, ppas, or other 3rd party repos. If for some reason you have a
> | dependency installed from one of those sources that is newer than what R
> | on cran was built against (stock ubuntu 14.04) then you will hit a conflict.
> |
> | Simply removing backports from your repos will not solve the problem.
> | You actually have to roll back the version of any packages you install
> | from backports.
> |
> | For ppas, there's a really cool tool out there call ppa-purge which will
> | roll back anything installed from a specific ppa. For backports you're
> | going to have to do it by hand. Maybe there's a nice dpkg way to list
> | all packages you installed from backports?
>
> +1
>
> And that is what I was referring to with 'show us your error messages'.  If
> something 'blocks', do a 'apt-cache policy nameofthatpackage' to see where it
> came from.  Worst case, uninstall components (carefully) as suggested here.
> By removing R and pieces you should not be able to brick your system.
>
> PPAs are great, but they are /not/ tested against each other as the distro
> core is.
>
> Dirk
>