[R-pkg-team] Bug#1108078: r-cran-bh: fails hard with 'Boost not found'

[Michael Prokop]

Hi,

* Michael Prokop [Fri Jun 20, 2025 at 10:00:37AM +0200]:

> it feels like r-cran-bh on Debian/bookworm seems to be broken hard?
> At least it's always failing hard for me, with:
> 
> | Error in stan_model(model_code = stancode, verbose = TRUE) :
> |   Boost not found; call install.packages('BH')
> 
> Minimal steps to reproduce:
> 
> % cat > demo.r << EOF
> example(stan_model, package = "rstan", run.dontrun = TRUE, verbose = TRUE)
> EOF
> % podman run --pull=always --rm -i -t -v $(pwd)/:/code:rw debian:bookworm bash
> 
> Inside the podman container (or on any Debian/bookworm system of course):
> 
>   apt update
>   apt install -y dpkg-dev  # dpkg-architecture is needed
>   apt install -y r-cran-rstan --no-install-recommends
> 
> Executing `r /code/demo.r` then triggers the failure mentioned above.
> 
> FTR: There's no change, if one drops the `--no-install-recommends`
> from the package installation of `r-cran-rstan` above, but disabling
> recommends reduces the package installation from ~2GB to ~450MB.
> 
> FYI: r-cran-rstan v2.32.7-1 with r-cran-bh v1.84.0-1 on current
> Debian/testing AKA trixie seems to work fine and doesn't behave like
> that.

Thanks to the wonderful feedback from Dirk Eddelbuettel (thanks
again!), we managed to find a workaround for this issue, see
attached patch file.

Note: this fix is relevant for stable/bookworm only (not relevant
nor necessary for Debian/testing AKA trixie!). There might be even
better ways to fix this, but a) it's working, b) minimal change and
c) still follows the initial idea, that we already have libboost-dev
available and want to have rstan cooperate with an "empty" BH
package.

Given that r-cran-bh doesn't seem to be working in Debian/bookworm
at all, this might possibly even warrant a fix via proposed-updates
to reach the next bookworm Debian point release?

regards
-mika-
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