Ubuntu
gcc-defaults package

gcc is broken in Gutsy Tribe5 directly after installation+upgrade

Bug #137608 reported by Martin Olsson
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gcc-defaults (Ubuntu)
Won't Fix
Undecided
Matthias Klose

Bug Description

I just installed Gutsy tribe 5 to the harddrive. I press reload and mark all updates in synaptic, wait like 20 minutes for it to finish (no errors). Then I started a terminal, used nano to create the simplest possible program test.c like this:

int main()
{
  return 0;
}

Then I saved and in terminal I invoked "gcc test.c", which fails with the following error message:

mnemo@gutsyT5:~/Desktop/eog/eog-2.18.2$ gcc test.c
/usr/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
mnemo@gutsyT5:~/Desktop/eog/eog-2.18.2$

Revision history for this message
Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote :

As a workaround I used this command:

        sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

(this installed something and then gcc worked). I would still except gcc to work out of the box, so plx fix this bug before Gutsy release.

Revision history for this message
Matthias Klose (doko) wrote :

gcc, as installed out of the box, works for building kernel modules; please install the build-essential package. normal "users" don't need the compiler, and so only essential bits are installed by default.

Changed in gcc-defaults:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote :

Many people check if gcc is installed by typing "gcc", if you need to have a bare bone non-usable gcc by default, then don't put it in the path at least. This will give users a more intuitive experience, i.e. "oh, it looks like gcc is not installed so thus I have install it" instead of "seems like gcc is installed but apparently it's not working, I better go online and see if someone else had this problem before etc".

Installing a non-usable gcc is practically begging for trouble... what if Microsoft installed a Wordpad icon which crashed Wordpad by default. No way they could get away with that.

Revision history for this message
Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote :

Broken GCC by default is very unintuitive; remove it from path so people understand that they need to install GCC.

Changed in gcc-defaults:
status: Invalid → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Matthias Klose (doko) wrote :

please don't confirm your own reports. Not invalidating again as I don't like to play ping pong with reports

Changed in gcc-defaults:
status: Confirmed → New
Revision history for this message
Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote :

ok sry, I won't do that in the future.I don't mean to be annoying, I just really feel some more thought should go into this bug. Do you guys understand why I think that a non-usable gcc is worse than no gcc at all?

Revision history for this message
Matthias Klose (doko) wrote :

> Broken GCC by default is very unintuitive

It's not broken, the install allows to build kernel modules, which was asked by end users. Please install the "build-essential" package to get a more complete build environment. Also note, that you need to install the -dev package for every library that you do use for your development work.

Closing this bug as wontfix.

Changed in gcc-defaults:
assignee: nobody → doko
status: New → Won't Fix
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