[R-sig-Fedora] Cannot install knitr

[Tom Callaway]

On 06/29/2017 06:04 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I am trying to install the package
>
> knitr
>
> but getting the following error:
>
> ----------------------
> Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) :
>   unable to load shared object '/usr/lib64/R/library/stringi/libs/stringi.so':
>   libicui18n.so.56: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
> Error : unable to load R code in package ‘knitr’
> ERROR: lazy loading failed for package ‘knitr’
> * removing ‘/usr/lib64/R/library/knitr’
> * restoring previous ‘/usr/lib64/R/library/knitr’
> ----------------------
>
> I suppose that the problem is that knitr expects
>
> libicu-56
>
> installed, but it is
>
> libicu-57
>
> that is installed.

Close, but this isn't knitr complaining.
/usr/lib64/R/library/stringi/libs/stringi.so comes from the "stringi"
CRAN module:

https://cran.r-project.org/package=stringi

You might have installed that from source, before updating libicu? You
might not have done this manually, it could have been pulled in as a
dependency of something else. "stringi" does not come with the core R
software, so it wasn't built wrong for Fedora/EPEL. :)

To reinstall it, just invoke (again):

install.packages("stringi")

That should succeed, and then the "stringi" shared object should be able
to load.

~tom