Installing a compiler by default

[Peter Garrett]

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 05:29:05 +1000
Adam Conrad <adconrad at ubuntu.com> 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.

Agreed. At that point the helper can point at the apt-howto, and introduce
apt-get build-dep , etc. etc.

I know the line must be drawn somewhere - I just think that having the
basic compiling tools available out of the box is not harmful, and is
helpful particularly to those beginners who want to learn more about
linux. 

As I said elsewhere, the constant repetition of "install build-essential"
gets old pretty fast on IRC, for example.

Note that when someone comes in and is attempting to compile and install
nvidia drivers etc, , the first reaction is to use the ubotu factoid that
points them to the BinaryDrivers wiki pages. That also becomes tiresome,
but given the existence of the proprietary drivers it is inevitable. The
build-essential one isn't, as Matt has pointed out.

Peter

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