Hey all, I'm about to reformat and start totally from scratch on this because it's been hanging me up for a week now. As it turns out, I'm still on Buster which is no longer the latest stable so I'll have to update my machine anyway, but that's an aside. Aside from being on Buster, my R is v. 4.2.2. I'd previously had Anaconda installed which may be messing something up wrt to paths but as far as I know I've wiped Anaconda from my system. As far as I know my repository is set to the proper CRAN for Buster and I don't have any other repositories which would conflict with that.

The error: Full paste of it here: [1], but here's the highlights afaik:

> install.packages('devtools')
Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘credentials’, ‘httr2’, ‘curl’, ‘gert’, ‘gh’, ‘httr’, ‘usethis’, ‘pkgdown’, ‘rcmdcheck’, ‘rversions’, 
‘urlchecker’
...
* installing *source* package ‘curl’ ...
** package ‘curl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
Found pkg-config cflags and libs!
Using PKG_CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
Using PKG_LIBS=-L/usr/local/lib -lcurl
** libs
...
installing to /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/00LOCK-curl/00new/curl/libs
** R
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** installing vignettes
** testing if installed package can be loaded from temporary location
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘curl’ in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...):
 unable to load shared object '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/00LOCK-curl/00new/curl/libs/curl.so':
  /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/00LOCK-curl/00new/curl/libs/curl.so: undefined symbol: curl_easy_option_next
Error: loading failed
Execution halted

What I've tried:

I've been all over the place looking for solutions for this. I've tried installing RCurl which seems to go fine. On SO thread suggesting installing devtools as root which I've tried to no avail. Another thread advised installing libcurl4-openssl-dev along with a host of other related packages but, again, no luck. (See Amit Kohli's comment [2]) When I try

find / curl.so -type f

I don't find any files. Not sure if that's something temp that R uses when installing?

Has anyone else run into this? Or any suggestions on how to root this out?

Thanks!

[1] https://pastebin.com/XZBJK2mK

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/38698271