[Rd] Can't build R 3.6.1 or 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 2:58 PM Saren Tasciyan <saren.tasciyan using ist.ac.at> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to build a more recent version (3.6.1 or 3.5.3) of R on
> Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Are you aware you can get up-to-date binaries either from PPA or CRAN:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/rrutter
  sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

> and I ran ./configure
> During "make", I get the following error:
> platform.o: In function `do_eSoftVersion':
> /home/user/Desktop/R-3.6.1/src/main/platform.c:3129: undefined reference
> to `u_getVersion_58'

Such linking errors indicate you are not linking against the correct
library that you compiled against. In this case, there seems to be a
version conflict because you compiled against version 58 of ICU, but
Ubuntu Bionic actually has ICU60:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/libicu-dev

So the question is how do you end up with ICU58 headers? I am guessing
your either installed a custom libicu in /usr/local/, or you upgraded
from an older version of ubuntu but haven't upgraded libicu-dev.
Either way the solution is to clean up your system and make sure there
is only one version of libicu.