Ideally your documentation would describe how do install the gsl linux package on multiple distributions.ĭisclaimer: I've never developed a package that directly requires a Linux package, but I use them a lot. On Debian or Ubuntu use libcurl4-openssl-dev: sudo apt-get install -y libcurl-dev Installation from source on Linux requires libcurl. For example, it provides the following explanation and bash code: The curl package does this very well too (eg, CRAN and GitHub). sf's CRAN page lists only the human names of the 3 libraries, but the GitHub page provides the exact bash commands for three major distribution branches. The best example of clear (linux pre-req package) documentation I've seen is from the curl and sf packages. This leads to the following bash code: sudo apt-get install libgsl0-dev The gsl package has decent CRAN directions. Try to be super clear on the GitHub readme and the CRAN INSTALL file. Primary Issue: making it easy for the users to install If the gsl package authors (which include a former R Core member) didn't configure it to avoid a pre-req installation of a linux package, there's probably a good reason not to.īut it may be some consolation that most R+Linux users understand that some R packages first require installing the underlying Linux libraries ( eg, through apt or dnf/yum). This may not have a satisfying solution via changes to your R package (I'm not sure either way).

R package build failing on Unix machines due to missing GSL - GNU Scientific Library Note that gsl-config lists the direct path to my Cellar, the paths above are brew symlinks. The following: CFLAGS='-I/usr/local/opt/gsl/include' LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/opt/gsl/lib -lgsl -lgslcblas' R I was able to get things working (OS X Yosemite 10.10, R 3.1.1, gsl 1.16, gsl R package 1.9-10) with standard brew-installed R and gsl by manually prefixing CFLAGS and LDFLAGS with the output from gsl-config -cflags and gsl-config -libs respectively.

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