PCRE configure problem with R-4.0.0

First of all, you mentioned Linux Mint, so you might get better advice
on R-SIG-Debian mailing list.

On Mon, 4 May 2020 16:15:42 +1200
Patrick Connolly <p_connolly at slingshot.co.nz> wrote:

There are quite a lot of packages in the repository for Linux Mint
17.2 with 'pcre' in the name and these are installed:

Apparantly the '3' doesn't indicate an updated '2' version

The funny thing about libpcre3 is that it is the old PCRE1 version,
third ABI-incompatible upgrade of it [*], and libpcre2 (available in
current releases of Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Debian) is supposed to be
the newer PCRE2.

Linux Mint 17.2 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, which has been released in
April 2014, while PCRE2 has been released in 2015.

reason why libpcre2 doesn't seem to be available to you (I have tried
searching both repositories, including backports, with no success).
Moreover, Ubuntu 14.04 only has PCRE 8.31, which is too old to work
with R 4.0. The official builds of R 4.0 [**] are not available for
Ubuntu 14.04, either.

Suggestions welcome.

You can try to backport PCRE 8.32 for Linux Mint 17.2 by taking the
source package for 8.31 (apt-get source pcre3), extracting the new
version of PCRE into it and fiddling with it until it builds (see
[***] for more information on that). This is a complicated procedure,
and if an important system component depends on PCRE, you can end up
breaking the system.

You can also try to install latest PCRE2 from source (./configure; make;
sudo make install) into /usr/local where it shouldn't interfere too much
with the rest of the system.

Another option could be upgrading to a supported release of Linux Mint
and installing the official binary build from [**].

Good luck!

--
Best regards,
Ivan

[*]
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#run-time-shared-libraries

[**] https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/

[***] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/