Installing glib-2.50.1: No package 'libpcre' founbd [duplicate]

Question

[UPDATE]

As per fkraiem's suggestion below, about the rabbithole (indeed, it does feel like that!), this is the first problem I encounter, and the reason I'm trying to install glib et al.

After running ./configure with pspp-0.10.2:

configure: error: The following required prerequisites are not installed. You must install them before PSPP can be built:

cairo 1.5 or later and pango 1.22 or later (or use --without-cairo)

gthread 2.0 (or use --without-gui)

gtk+ 3.0 version 3.4.2 or later (or use --without-gui)

gtksourceview 3.0 version 3.4.2 or later (or use --without-gui) glib 2.0 version 2.32 or later (or use --without-gui)

Though the Synaptic Package Manager shows I have Cairo 1.14.6-1 installed,

[ORIGINAL POST]

When trying to install glib-2.50.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 I receive the following error -

configure: error: Package requirements (libpcre >= 8.13) were not met:
No package 'libpcre' found

None of the existing posts about this issue provide any solutions.

I have pkg-config installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep pkg-config

ii  libextutils-pkgconfig-perl 1.15-1        all          Perl

interface to the pkg-config utility ii pkg-config 0.29.1-0ubuntu1 amd64 manage compile and link flags for libraries

And have a pckconfig folder in both /usr/lib and /usr/lib/local. Both folders contain:

/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/blas.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/blas-netlib.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/dbus-python.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/gsl.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/harfbuzz.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/harfbuzz-icu.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ibus-table.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/lapack.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/lapack-netlib.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libcryptsetup.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libffi.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libgdiplus.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libquvi-scripts.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libR.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/notify-python.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/pango.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/pangocairo.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/pangoft2.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/pm-utils.pc

Regarding the PKG_CONFIG_PATH

$ pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config

yields

/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib
/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig

And

ldconfig -v | grep pcre

yields

/sbin/ldconfig.real: Can't stat /lib/i686-linux-gnu: No such file or
directory
/sbin/ldconfig.real: Can't stat /usr/lib/i686-linux-gnu: No such file
or directory
/sbin/ldconfig.real: Path `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' given more than once
/sbin/ldconfig.real: Path `/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' given more than
once
/sbin/ldconfig.real: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.23.so is the dynamic
linker, ignoring
        libpcre.so.3 -> libpcre.so.3.13.2       libpcreposix.so.3 ->
libpcreposix.so.3.13.2  libpcre32.so.3 -> libpcre32.so.3.13.2
        libpcre++.so.0 -> libpcre++.so.0.0.0    libpcre16.so.3 ->
libpcre16.so.3.13.2     libpcrecpp.so.0 -> libpcrecpp.so.0.0.1
/sbin/ldconfig.real: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.23.so is the dynamic
linker, ignoring

I'm here because I'm trying to install PSPP v0.10.2 of PSPP. The installation guide cautions that:

* pkg-config (http://pkg-config.freedesktop.org/wiki/).  Versions
  0.18 and 0.19 have a bug that will prevent library detection,
  but other versions should be fine.

But since I'm using 0.29 I assume that bug isn't relevant?

Answer 1

For anyone encountering this question later in time. I've ran into similar problems compiling pspp on ubuntu 16.04. The packages I installed (sudo apt install) to solve the issue were as follows:

sudo apt install libxml2-dev
libcairo2-dev
libreadline-dev
libglib2.0-dev
libgsl-dev
libgtk-3-dev
libgtksourceview-3.0-dev