Installing a compiler by default

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:16:16PM +0200, Luca Donetti wrote:
> 2006/6/8, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com>:
> 
> >I'm interested in hearing more opinions one way or the other, especially
> >from beyond the developer community.
> >
> 
> It seems to me that one of the main reasons for the inclusion is the
> relative difficulty to find the proper way to install the compiler for
> new ubuntu users.
> I don't know if there are technical difficulties (conflicting
> packages, upgrades...) but I think that a possible solution could be
> to install a "fake" gcc (and possibly other tools as "make" etc) that
> only prints a message explaining the proper way (apt-get install
> build-essentials) to install a building enviroment.
> Is it possible to do this in a clean way? Are there problems with this
> approach I am missing?

It's much more complex to do it this way (the usual approach to something
like this would be dpkg diversions, which are notoriously easy to get wrong
and result in many bugs), and the only benefit over my proposed solution is
a savings of some disk space.

-- 
 - mdz