Bug#962804: wfmath: autopkgtest failure: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

[Simon McVittie]

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 14:15:02 -0400, Olek Wojnar wrote:
> Hmm, is build-essential not automatically installed in the CI environment? That
> seems to be the most likely reason for this failure. I assumed that all
> packages (e.g. build-essential) that we assume to be present for packaging
> would be present here as well. Is that not the case?

No, as with ordinary packaging you can only rely on having the
Essential:yes set, plus their hard dependencies, plus the hard
dependencies you declare (recursively). (In practice testbeds will
usually have a few extra packages, such as an init system, but don't
rely on those.)

Some tests compile what they need from scratch, but some don't. In
particular, this means maintainers are able to verify with reasonable
confidence that a package's dependencies are sufficient to make it work.

    smcv