[R] Install from sources on Alpine Linux (error: 'int32_t' does not name a type)

[m-martin]

Hello, I am trying to install the "arrow" R package from sources on an Alpine Linux, but am getting the errors in the logfile attached.

Steps to reproduce:

• Create a container using the alpine:3.22 image.
• apk add --no-cache alpine-sdk bash cmake linux-headers R R-dev
• R
• Sys.setenv("ARROW_R_DEV" = TRUE)
• install.packages("arrow")

This gives me multiple errors (see attached log), e.g.

/tmp/RtmpOpIGAD/file146f6b99f13d/re2_ep-prefix/src/re2_ep/util/pcre.h:503:11: error: 'int32_t' does not name a type

Is installation on Alpine not a supported case? Or what could be the problem?

2025_06 Alpine R Arrow.txt

Component(s)

R

[raulcd]

Can you try installing some of the C++ dependencies from the apk repositories instead of building from source?

As seen here on this Dockerfile:

arrow/ci/docker/alpine-linux-3.18-cpp.dockerfile

Line 57 in 30cc5dd

re2-dev \

[m-martin]

Thank you for the hint.

I tried some things, but all without success unfortunately:

• I installed all dependencies listed in the mentioned Dockerfile => same result as before.
• After installing all the dependencies from the Dockerfile, I used Sys.setenv("ARROW_DEPENDENCY_SOURCE" = "SYSTEM"), which gave me another error on install.packages("arrow"): 2025_06 Alpine R Arrow (3).txt
• I used alpine:3.18 instead of 3.22, installed all dependencies as in the Dockerfile => yet another error: 2025_06 Alpine R Arrow (4).txt

[raulcd]

Thanks, that's interesting. Could you share a minimal Dockerfile to try and reproduce it?

[m-martin]

Sure, this is a Dockerfile where building the R arrow package fails with

error: 'int32_t' does not name a type

(and some other errors):
r-arrow.Dockerfile.txt

Note that it installs all the packages installed in the Dockerfile referenced by you above plus R and R-dev.

[black-comb]

I think we can close this issue as a consequence of #43350.
(Unlike described in the other issue, however, installing re2-dev does not help when building arrow from R with install.packages("arrow").)

[bastistician]

I can confirm that this bug still exists in arrow 22.
To reproduce the compilation failure interactively, run the following inside docker run --rm -it alpine:

apk add R R-doc R-dev g++ cmake bash
export ARROW_R_DEV=true  # more extensive logging
R -s -e 'install.packages("arrow", Ncpus = 4, repos = "https://cloud.R-project.org")'

(NB: something in arrow seems to depend on a bash command, which should probably also be fixed.)

arrow.log

Even if installed, a system re2-dev is not used because the build script always chooses the bundled version by default (due to #39514):

arrow/r/inst/build_arrow_static.sh

Line 104 in 430ad81

-Dre2_SOURCE=${re2_SOURCE:-BUNDLED} \

Two possible workarounds:

• install.packages("arrow", configure.vars = list(arrow = "ARROW_WITH_RE2=OFF"))
• install re2-dev and use install.packages("arrow", configure.vars = list(arrow = "re2_SOURCE=SYSTEM")) (apparently undocumented)

It appears that all other bundled dependencies used by default build fine under musl libc, but re2 doesn't. Can it be fixed?

[thisisnic]

Thanks for the comment @bastistician - this is helpful. Looks like the simplest solution here is for us to bump the bundled version of RE2 to one that contains the fix.

[thisisnic]

That was not, in fact, the simplest solution; will look into using system RE2 on Alpine