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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 23 March 2016 at 12:35, Barnet Wagman wrote:
| One of the dependency problems I'm having is:
| 
| gfortran-4.8 : Depends: gcc-4.8-base (= 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) but 
| 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1 is installed.
| 
| I'm not sure how to  interpret this.  Does this mean that the gfortran 
| installed is too recent?  If so, does R really require an older version 
| of gfortran, or is this related to the way the r-base-core package is 
| specified?

That is more promising and probably related to the liblapack/libblas issue!
With a bit of 'apt-cache policy' on these you may be able to find where they
are from; and you need the ones that R wants into order to use R.

Sometimes you get by specifying both as in

  $ sudo apt-get install gfortran-4.8 gcc-4.8-base

ie asking for both to be (re-)installed.  That may point to another package,
and you may have to recurse once or twice more.  As Alex correctly pointed
out, this is quite possibly due to the other backports.

I "own" Docker setup involving Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, but rarely add
anything besides CRAN in those (by design more minimal) setups.

Lastly, and please don't take this the wrong way: I think I am helping way
more people like you who for one reason or other insist on older / frozen
system like 14.04 but then desire newer software.  Simply running _current_
Ubuntu and upgrading every six months is IMHO much easier.  I've been doing
it for a decade on lots of machines across home and different workplaces.
YMMV, but it may be worth considering to just upgrade.  gcc and g++ 5.2 are
much nicer anyway :)

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org