Error when compiling gsl

[jonathon-love]

hi,

i'm just having some difficulties compiling gsl, and was hoping for some advice on how to go about correcting the issue. i have GSL 2.6 installed, and you can see can see that configure finds /app/bin/gsl-config below. running /app/bin/gsl-config --version outputs 2.6.

* installing *source* package ‘gsl’ ...
** package ‘gsl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
checking for gsl-config... /app/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’

any idea what the issue could be here?

with thanks

[RobinHankin]

hello Jonathon. I'm not sure what is going on here, as GSL would seem to be installed correctly on your system. Can you compile a "hello world" C program such as doc/examples/intro.c?

[jonathon-love]

hi, thanks for the quick response.

i am able to build many R packages (including those that use native code) without issue.

with thanks

[jonathon-love]

hmm, let me do a bit more digging. it looks like the include headers are not where they should be.

with thanks

[LiNk-NY]

Hi Robin, @RobinHankin

I am also having this error:

> install.packages("gsl")
Installing package into '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library'
(as 'lib' is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/cran/__linux__/bionic/latest/src/contrib/gsl_2.1-7.tar.gz'
Content type 'binary/octet-stream' length 215815 bytes (210 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 210 KB

* 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'

despite having

gsl-config --version
2.4

I've also tried installing the package with and it didn't work:

$ 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" R

[jonathon-love]

in my case, gsl (the R package) wasn't looking where gsl (the system library) had put the headers.

[skr5k]

i have exactly the same issue

:~$ gsl-config --version
2.4

but install.packages("gsl") gives

configure: error: Need GSL version >= 1.16
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘gsl’

[sebidelamata]

Hi, I'm having this exact problem as well and was wondering if anyone found a solution?

[LiNk-NY]

Note. I am not getting this error and I am able to install gsl_2.1-7.1.tar.gz but, I have GSL version 2.5

$ /usr/bin/gsl-config --version
2.5

which triggers some conditional code in gsl

[PaulEloff]

Hi, I had this same issue today on Ubuntu 18.04, where I had GSL 2.4 installed, but I would get the "Need GSL version >= 1.16" error as well. After trying many libgsl-dev versions from many repos, the only solution that worked for me was the one suggested here.

I don't think that the following is relevant, but my architecture involves running Ubuntu in WSL2 on a Windows 10 VM.