Bug#960214: gcc-9 breaks libalien-wxwidgets-perl autopkgtest: Can't exec "gcc": No such file or directory

[Niko Tyni]

On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 07:47:33PM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote:
 
> [This looks very similar to bug #960212 which will be a duplicate if
> really gcc-9 is at fault here.]
> 
> With a recent upload of gcc-9 the autopkgtest of libalien-wxwidgets-perl

> # Can't exec "gcc": No such file or directory at
> /usr/share/perl/5.30/ExtUtils/CBuilder/Base.pm line 342.

Hi,

I think the problem is that libalien-wxwidgets-perl Depends: gcc |
c-compiler, but doesn't work with tcc, which provides the latter.
The failing autopkgtest run seems to pick the tcc package for c-compiler
instead of gcc-9.

Similarly for #960212, where iraf-dev Depends: gcc | c-compiler.

I couldn't easily find a definition for the c-compiler virtual package,
but I suspect it's only loosely defined and this bug should to be fixed
by removing the alternative dependency.

I tried to look a bit into what makes apt choose this package combination,
but couldn't find anything. In particular, none of the sid amd64
Packages files around the time seem to result in gcc-9 being temporary
uninstallable, which is what I was suspecting.

I've just scheduled a retry of this job on amd64 to see if it was
transient. In any case, I doubt the fault is in gcc-9.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org