Installing a compiler by default

[Adam Conrad]

Erast Benson wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 05:29 +1000, Adam Conrad wrote:
>   
>> Anyone who thinks that having build-essential installed will somehow
>> make life easier for "casual developers" or "people who want install
>> from tarballs" has obviously never tried using it for those cases.  You
>> will still need a mess of libfoo-dev packages to provide headers for the
>> dependencies of whatever you're trying to compile, etc.
>>     
>
> Adam, the whole issue is around drivers, and not user-space apps.
> For source drivers, you only need kernel headers pre-installed. Than
> "solutions" like DKMS and other wrappers will work OK.
>   
I know that the initial discussion was mainly focussed on drivers, but
people have used the "casual developer" use case as another argument for
installing a compiler by default.  I just wanted to put that one to rest
as being almost entirely bogus.

... Adam