C programs Solved

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 20:23 +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> I was slightly mistaken about the purpose of build-essential.  After
> checking the description I now see that it is needed for building
> Debian packages.  

aptitude show build-essential
" If you do not plan to build Debian packages, you don't need this
package.  Moreover this package is not required for building Debian
packages."                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Confusing, isn't it :)


> For arbitrary C programs it should be enough to install gcc
> and libc6-dev.

build-essential depends on libc6-dev, gcc, g++, make, and dpkg-dev. g++
and dpkg-dev might not be needed by everyone who programs in C, the
others are -- and nobody in his right mind will use gcc without make.
Thus, it's usually easier to simply tell people to install
build-essential (and sooner or later they will want to compile a debian
package anyway)