Installing R gsl package on Ubuntu

Question

I am failing to install the R package gsl on my ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and I don't understand what the problem is.

From within R:

> install.packages('gsl')
* installing *source* package ‘gsl’ ...
** package ‘gsl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
checking for gsl-config... /usr/bin/gsl-config
checking if GSL version >= 2.1... checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
configure: error: Need GSL version >= 1.16
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘gsl’
* removing ‘/home/luca_ph/R/lib/R/library/gsl’

It sais it needs gsl version >= 1.16, however I have it installed:

dpkg -s libgsl-dev | grep Version
Version: 2.4+dfsg-6

Also, gsl-config is available in the $PATH (as suggested here.

I tried to pass the appropiate compiler arguments to R when calling it (as suggested here), however it fails all the same:

> gsl-config --libs
-L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -lgsl -lgslcblas -lm
> gsl-config --cflags
-I/usr/include
> CFLAGS="-I/usr/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -lgsl -lgslcblas -lm" R
> install.packages('gsl')
[...]
* installing *source* package ‘gsl’ ...
** package ‘gsl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
checking for gsl-config... /usr/bin/gsl-config
checking if GSL version >= 2.1... checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
configure: error: Need GSL version >= 1.16
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘gsl’

What am I missing here?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Despite the error message, R package gsl now requires GSL version >= 2.5 (see here). Even though I was able to install the most recent version of GSL (2.7), I wasn't knowledgeable enough to follow the advice in the INSTALL file of the R package:

If the gsl R package builds successfully but will not load, make sure to inform your system linker/loader where to find the GSL libraries used to compile it. That step may be missed when using a manual GSL installation as opposed to one performed by a package manager.

So I opted to use the PPA repo linked to in the How to get GNU software webpage which had GSL version 2.5 available.

In short, I ran these commands to overcome the issue you describe:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dns/gnu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install libgsl-dev

Not 100% sure if this is generally applicable, but I also had to remove the previous version of GSL with the sudo apt remove command before installing the newer version.