How to install stringi library from archive and install the local icu52l.zip

Question

We\'re bumbling through making some R code work in a production environment and as part of that we\'re installing some R packages as follows:

# Default direc         


        

Answer 1

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Note: for Stringi >= 0.5-1 please check the answer by @gagolews

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From INSTALL file:

The stringi package depends on the ICU4C >= 50 library.

So libicu42 is far to old.

If you check install.R file you'll find following lines:

mirrors <- c("http://static.rexamine.com/packages/",
    "http://www.mini.pw.edu.pl/~gagolews/stringi/",
    "http://www.ibspan.waw.pl/~gagolews/stringi/")

A couple of lines later you'll find something like this:

if (!grepl("^https?://", href)) {
    # try to copy icudt from a local repo
    if (!file.exists(href)) return("no icudt in a local repo")

If you add local path at the beginning of the mirrors and put downloaded libraries it seems to work as expected. Here you can a patch I've used: https://gist.github.com/zero323/338c8fb0faf46e5ac06d

So my solution would be to:

• clone the repostiory
• checkout version you want
• apply patch with a path to the local version of the ICU
• install package from source

There is probably a better way, but that is what I came up so far.