- Before proceeding with installation of Python dependencies, check
whether the 'gcc' command is available by running it with the
--version argument. If it is not available, print a helpful message
and exit.
- For the current set of Python dependencies, without GCC, the build
process fails when building the crypt-r package. According to the
error message, on my system the exact command it tries to run is
'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc', but rather than depend on this variant
specifically, the script checks for the generic 'gcc' command, so as
to avoid coupling the check to an architecture or operating system.
Similar problems arise if we attempt to check for packages by name;
the compiler binary is provided by 'gcc-11', but the symlinks that
provide the unversioned commands (as used by the Python build) come
from a package named 'gcc'. Trying to be too precise in what we
check for could lead to unnecessary failures in some environments,
or become a maintenance challenge in the future. For that reason,
this change simply attempts to run 'gcc' and uses that as a
probably-sufficient proxy for having what the Python package install
will need.
- The Python modules installed by initenv.sh require a compiler to build.
- Revised initenv.sh to check whether build-essential is installed
before proceeding, if the system is based on Debian or Ubuntu.
If you run it as scripts/initenv.sh,
activating venv is useless as bash will exit immediately afterwards.
If you `source` it as suggested by README.md,
`set -e` will set the flag for the current shell
and your shell will exit as soon as some command returns non-zero status,
e.g. cmdeploy fails or you simply do `ls /foo/bar/baz` and `ls`
complains that `/foo/bar/baz` does not exist.
