Load spatialite extension in RSQLite crashes R (OS X & Ubuntu)

Question

I am running some queries against a spatialite database, and would like to get the data directly into R. This page suggests I can do something like this:

library(RSQLite)
sqldrv <- dbDriver("SQLite") 
con <- dbConnect(sqldrv, dbname = "/path/to/db.sqlite",loadable.extensions = TRUE)  
spatialitestatus <- dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT load_extension('libspatialite.dylib')")

But when I do, R segfaults with the following:

 *** caught segfault ***
address 0x0, cause 'memory not mapped'

Traceback:
 1: .Call("RS_SQLite_fetch", rsId, nrec = n, PACKAGE = .SQLitePkgName)
 2: sqliteFetch(rs, n = -1, ...)
 3: sqliteQuickSQL(conn, statement, ...)
 4: dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT load_extension('/usr/local/lib/libspatialite.dylib')")
 5: dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT load_extension('/usr/local/lib/libspatialite.dylib')")

In my case, spatialite was built from source using Homebrew, as is the version of sqlite that I would normally use. In the libspatialite homebrew definition, it says it depends on sqlite > 3.7.3. My homebrewed version of sqlite is 3.7.17

I don't know for certain what version of sqlite RSQLite pulls in by default, but I assume it's the version 3.7.17 version included in the RSQLite source package. I tried building RSQLite from source using install.packages(c("RSQLite"), type="source") in hopes that it would simply use my version of sqlite, but it doesn't look like it did. Or if it did, it's still crashing.

Finally, I should mention that I tried this under two versions of R with same results:

• R 3.0.0 downloaded in binary form from CRAN
• R 3.0.1 downloaded in source form and installed via homebrew

UPDATE:

Crash confirmed in Ubuntu 13.04 using the libspatialite5 provided by the Ubuntu FOSS GIS repository.

Answer 1

It appears that recent versions of libspatialite (4.x) are problematic. In addition, loading the homebrewed libspatialite3 extension works, but subsequent queries resulted in the same segfault.

In the end, my (short-term, temporary, hackish) solution was to create an R package that compiles its own spatialite and loads it. RSQLite.spatialite can be found here.