Configure error: checking if libcurl supports https... no

Am Sonntag, 29. August 2021, 11:01:43 CEST schrieb Rolf Turner:

On Sun, 29 Aug 2021 10:16:16 +0200

Johannes Ranke <johannes.ranke at jrwb.de> wrote:

...

You can try

$ sudo apt build-dep r-base

to pull in all build dependencies specified by Dirks R debs, and try
again.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I did

   sudo apt build-dep r-base

as instructed.

I assume this pulled in some unrelated packages. As you do not mention any 
output, I assume there was no error.

I then noticed that I could not run R --- got a "permission denied"
error.  So I next did:

...

P.S. Clearly there must be something broken in my system, but how on
earth do I track down what's wrong?

One reason for what you see could be that you have previously compiled and 
installed curl from source (which will also build and install libcurl), and 
this local installation does not have ssl support.

One check that I can think of is to run

$ which curl

which returns

/usr/bin/curl

if you only have the Ubuntu package installed.

Johannes