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DaniCee
Asked: 2018-07-10 20:13:37 +0800 CST

R: Cannot install rJava; what is r-api-3.4?

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I am on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine with R version 3.5.1, installed following this link. I am trying to install the CRAN package rJava, which I do the following way (as seen here):

sudo apt-get install r-cran-rjava

However, I get this:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 r-cran-rjava : Depends: r-api-3.4
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

But when I try:

sudo apt-get install r-api-3.4

I get:

E: Package 'r-api-3.4' has no installation candidate

How to overcome this problem with r-api-3.4? Basically, I need to install rJava to be able to install and use XLConnect... In Ubuntu 16.04, I had no problems whatsoever...

EDIT:

Apparently, r-api-3.4 should be provided by r-base-core. I do have r-base-core installed in its newest version, why do I still see errors then?

software-installation r java

1 Answers

  1. I guess the issue is that, when you were trying to install r-cran-rjava, it required you to have R 3.4 on your system (i.e. the version of the official Ubuntu repositories) rather than R 3.5.

    It looks like this can be an issue for other packages, like rkward for example (it also asks for r-api-3.4 and can't resolve the dependency).

    To fix that, you might have to add an extra PPA that provides newer version of extra R packages for the 3.5 branch, like Michael Rutter's cran2deb4ubuntu_3.5, which seems to be the reference. (It currently contains r-cran-rjava in its version 0.9-10-3cran1ppa0bionic0)

    This might do the trick:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/c2d4u3.5
sudo apt update
sudo apt install r-cran-rjava
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