[R-sig-Debian] r-cran-rjava dependencies on debian jesse, library(rJava) fails when default-jre is missing

[Vaidotas Zemlys]

Hi,

Dirk Eddelbuettel advised me to write here. Here is my original letter to him:

I would like to enquire about package r-cran-rjava on Debian jesse. It seems that if default-jre package is not installed, but openjdk-7-jre is installed, then library(rJava) in R fails. I’ve been bitten by this today and I wonder whether this an issue of mine, or is this a possible bug. 

My server admin used apt-get update and apt-get upgrade today and R started throwing an error that it cannot find libjvm.so, when trying to do library(rJava). At first I thought that this is a problem of setting JAVA_HOME, and setting it to JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64 before starting R seemed to solve the problem. But this setting was ignored by shiny-server, so I spent some time figuring out how to force shiny-server to respect it. Only after repeated failure I’ve noticed that LD_LIBRARY_PATH in Sys.getenv() points to /usr/lib/jvm/default-java/jre/lib/amd64/server and there was no directory /usr/lib/jvm/default-java/ in the system. Then I found out that this library is provided by default-jre and when it was installed everything start to work. Then I investigated further and found that this package is only optional for r-cran-rjava. Hence the question.


Here is my configuration:

> lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 (jessie)
Release:	8.8
Codename:	jessie


dpkg -l with relevant packages:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                              Version               Architecture          Description
+++-=================================-=====================-=====================-========================================================================
ii  r-cran-rjava                      0.9-6-3               amd64                 GNU R low-level interface to Java
ii  r-base                            3.3.3-1~jessiecran.0  all                   GNU R statistical computation and graphics system
ii  openjdk-7-jre:amd64                7u121-2.6.8-2~deb8u1               amd64        OpenJDK Java runtime, using Hotspot JIT
ii  openjdk-7-jre-headless:amd64       7u121-2.6.8-2~deb8u1               amd64        OpenJDK Java runtime, using Hotspot JIT (headless)

Sorry for bothering if this is an issue from my side. 

Vaidotas Zemlys-Balevičius