[R-sig-Debian] Configure error: checking if libcurl supports https... no --- slight update.

[Rolf Turner]

Hi All,

I just thought I'd let you know that I've tried a couple of other
things.  No real progress, but.

(1) In respect of just-plain-curl: to make the issue clearer, I tried

    curl --version

and got:

> > curl: /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4: no version information available
> > (required by curl)
> curl: symbol lookup error: curl: undefined symbol: curl_mime_free,
> version CURL_OPENSSL_4

I found that there was another, apparently newer, version of
libcurl.so.4 in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.  I realised that I did
not have /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu in my LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  So I put it
into that path (*before* /usr/local/lib) and "curl --version" now
seems to be OK and gives:

> curl 7.68.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f
> zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0
> (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0
> librtmp/2.3 Release-Date: 2020-01-08 Protocols: dict file ftp ftps
> gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp
> sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp Features: AsynchDNS brotli
> GSS-API HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz NTLM
> NTLM_WB PSL SPNEGO SSL TLS-SRP UnixSockets  

which verbose, but I guess that's alright.

(2) In respect of libcurl and https:

I did a web search on "libcurl >= 7.28.0 library and headers are
required" and after much thrashing around found what looked like a
useful hit at https://www.xspdf.com/help/51318770.html .

The problem(s) described are exactly the same as mine.  Different
correspondents report different results; one person said that
installing libcurl4-openssl-dev solved the problem, another said that
it didn't but that libcurl4-gnutls-dev did work.

It was nice to know that I am not alone, but neither of the foregoing
solutions worked for me.  Then another correspondent suggested that the
problem might be with the gcc variant.  I thought that this was
promising.

I found that my gcc version was 9.3.0.  I found that the latest version
seemed to be 11.2, so I tried to upgrade.  The process seemed to be
endlessly complicated but I eventually got a new version such that

   gcc --version

gives "(Ubuntu 11.1.0-1ubuntu1~20.04) 11.1.0".  (11.1 not 11.2 ??? Oh,
well.)

But then I tried the configure step again, with the new gcc in place,
and got the same old error.  Story of my life.

I'm going mad, *mad* I tell you!!! :-)

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276