arrow R package binary and system requirements

answer.md

My answer to https://community.rstudio.com/t/install-arrow-from-posit-package-manager-binary-in-ubuntu/170776/2 which is waiting for moderation.

You need some system packages as well that arrow.so is linking to. There are different ways to see what exactly.

1. You can manually inspect arrow.so using ldd arrow.so so see what is missing.

2. Some packages, e.g. pak can look up system requirements. The devel version (from https://pak.r-lib.org/reference/install.html#nightly-builds) is better at this:

> pak::pkg_sysreqs("arrow")
── Install scripts ────────────────────────────────────── Ubuntu 22.04 ──
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev

── Packages and their system dependencies ───────────────────────────────
arrow – libcurl4-openssl-dev, libssl-dev

3. Or, if you use pak to install the package, then it will automatically install the system requirements for you. (This is if you are the root user, or have password-less sudo. Otherwise it'll still print the system packages you need.)

> pak::pkg_install("arrow")
✔ Loading metadata database ... done

→ Will install 9 packages.
→ Will download 9 packages with unknown size.
+ R6           2.5.1    [dl]
+ arrow        12.0.1.1 [dl] + ✖ libcurl4-openssl-dev, ✖ libssl-dev
+ assertthat   0.2.1    [dl]
+ bit          4.0.5    [dl]
+ bit64        4.0.5    [dl]
+ magrittr     2.0.3    [dl]
+ purrr        1.0.1    [dl]
+ tidyselect   1.2.0    [dl]
+ withr        2.5.0    [dl]
→ Will install 2 system packages:
+ libcurl4-openssl-dev  - arrow
+ libssl-dev            - arrow
ℹ Getting 9 pkgs with unknown sizes
✔ Got assertthat 0.2.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-ubuntu-22.04) (52.46 kB)
[...]
✔ Downloaded 9 packages (21.98 MB)in 4.5s
ℹ Installing system requirements
ℹ Executing `sh -c apt-get -y update`
ℹ Executing `sh -c apt-get -y install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev`
✔ Installed R6 2.5.1  (1.1s)
✔ Installed arrow 12.0.1.1  (1.1s)
[...]
✔ 1 pkg + 13 deps: kept 5, added 9, dld 9 (21.98 MB) [17.5s]