problems with install in R on Linux with openjdk-9

[Luzie Ursula Wingen]

Hi all,

Not a real question any more, as I found a solution, but I thought I flag it up if anyone else has trouble.

I tried to install under R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30) under Ubuntu Linux and openjdk-9.
The command:
> install.packages(’corehunter’)
came back with:

Error: package or namespace load failed for "corehunter":
.onLoad failed in loadNamespace() for ’corehunter’, details:
call: if (version < req.version) {
error: missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
Error: loading failed

After some investigation why that would happen, I found that the function "java.version"
in script "java.R" returned an NA value, as the string of the java version was constructed
differently from expected:

> version.string <- J("java.lang.System")$getProperty("java.version")
> version.string
[1] "9-internal"

The expectation is <somestring>.<versionnumber>

I changed java.R to fit my version:

# ------------------ #
# GENERAL JAVA STUFF #
# ------------------ #

java.version <- function(){
  version.string <- J("java.lang.System")$getProperty("java.version")
  if(grepl('[.]',version.string))
    version <- as.integer(strsplit(version.string, ".", fixed = TRUE)[[1]][2])
   else ### crude fix by Luzie as Java version of JDK 9 is different
     version <- as.integer(strsplit(version.string, "-", fixed = TRUE)[[1]][1])
  return(version)
}

and the installation then ran smoothly.

Cheers

Luzie

[Herman De Beukelaer]

Hi Luzie,

Thanks for reporting this issue. It is due to the new version-string scheme that has been introduced with Java 9. Full details are provided here: http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/223. I was unaware of this until now.

I have added a fix similar as yours to java.R and will soon deploy a new version of Core Hunter to CRAN, so that the package is fully compatible with Java 9.

Thanks a lot!

Herman

[Herman De Beukelaer]

Hi all,

We have deployed an update of Core Hunter, version 3.2.1, to CRAN. It should fix install problems with Java 9 (and Java 10, which has also been released in the meantime).

Luzie, could you perhaps verify whether you can install the new version properly on your computer?

Thanks

Herman