compilation - zlib/bz2 library and headers are requried for compiling R

Question

Trying to compile R-3.3.2 on Debian Jessie, all dependencies are installed. However the ./configure script complains about the zlib/bzip2 library versions not matching with the minimum requirement.

Minimum version required:

• zlib: 1.2.6 (installed version: 1.2.11)
• bzip2: 1.0.6 (installed version: 1.0.6)

Answer 1

After looking at the parts of configure script checking the library versions, it seems that it compares versions with strcmp or strncmp. Since "1.2.11" is lexicographically smaller that "1.2.6" it return a non-zero value indicating that the match failed. Besides, it just compares the first 5 characters which is also not what it is intented. So, it's a bug in configure script. Changing the script fixed the issue.

For zlib, find this line:

exit(strncmp(ZLIB_VERSION, "1.2.5", 5) < 0);

Change it to:

exit(ZLIB_VERNUM < 0x1250);