let dpkg know that we have a c-compiler?

[emmanuelthome]

I like your work!

I came across a slight infelicity this morning. When you want to apt install extra packages, some might depend on a C compiler being around. libtool is one of them.

Under debian, libtool is marked as depending on the virtual package c-compiler, which can be provided by a variety of compilers. Presently, on bullseye this pulls gcc-10 by default.

The sad thing is that your images do have a compiler, of course, and this pull of gcc seems largely unneeded. Would you welcome a modification that creates a phony intermediate package that provides the c-compiler dependency (along with the required symlinks and alternatives set up) ?

[silkeh]

Sorry for the late response.

Would you welcome a modification that creates a phony intermediate package that provides the c-compiler dependency (along with the required symlinks and alternatives set up) ?

Yes! A dummy package (using equivs or equivalent) is definitely welcome!

[silkeh]

The images now install the clang package from the LLVM Debian repository, which provides c++-compiler, c-compiler, and objc-compiler. This should mean that dpkg knows we have a C compiler, but let me know if it doesn't work.

[emmanuelthome]

Hi!

That makes perfect sense and solves the problem indeed.

There is still the (comparatively minor) problem that libtool, for example, depends on the cpp package, and that there is no compiler-agnostic virtual package (like c-compiler) that cpp would be a provider of. It's not a big deal because we're only talking about pulling a few MB, versus a few dozen MB for a full-blown compiler. Furthermore, I would really say that this is a debian bug, not your bug.

FWIW, my solution was here, and it's freakin ugly. If/when I get back to this, I would definitely check what equivs would allow me to do.