Installing a compiler by default

[Matthias Klose]

Matt Zimmerman schrieb:
> 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.

Pkg      Size(bytes) Inst-Size (kB)
make          382360       1572
libc6-dev    2734406      10700
libssp0-dev    10820         84
gcc-4.1       598820       1360
gcc             5110         28
cpp-4.1      2340410       5096
cpp            31174         52
dpkg-dev      109238        496
Total:       6212338      19388

In the case of gcc, the driver could be split out into it's own package;
checking for existance of the internal tools and give an appropriate
message if they are not found. Usually gcc is called before make in
configure scripts, so that should be enough (but that output will be
hidden in config.log).

  Matthias