Since I've gotten a few off-list replies, I feel like it's worth pointing out why people are having trouble building R from source on RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6.
R has always depended on some third party libraries, specifically, zlib, bzip2, xz, pcre, and curl. Prior to R 3.3.0, R depended on much older versions of these libraries, but, if they were not found on the system, they'd use bundled copies that were built on the fly. With 3.3.0+, R now depends on much newer versions of these libraries and no longer has bundled copies to fall back to. This means that R 3.3.0+ won't build against RHEL/CentOS 5 or 6 as is, because all of these libraries are too old on those releases of RHEL/CentOS. (RHEL/CentOS 7 is new enough, as is all currently supported releases of Fedora). Realizing that there are a lot of R users in situations where the distribution of Linux is out of their control (or who cannot upgrade to RHEL/CentOS 7 for some reason), I spent a not small amount of time figuring out how to build static copies of these libraries into R for EL5/EL6 (and then even more time cleaning the evidence of this work out of the internals so it didn't inherit into CRAN builds). That said, you really should consider moving from EL5/6 to EL7. It's nice. Builds of 3.3.1 are going through koji right now. EL5, EL6, and EL7 are finished, Fedora 22-24 will be done shortly. Please test and give feedback: EL5: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-fa43c0f5fa EL6: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-6add114acf EL7: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-0f6db0c4e2 ~tom == Red Hat _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Fedora mailing list R-SIG-Fedora@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora