I just posted, perhaps to the wrong address. I think this is a bug, but I am not going to report it as I have not been posting on debian-developers. Correct me if I should do so (though I'm not sure how to go about it). I think this is a bug.
gcc's installation failed because of a rather inane combination of circumstances---the postinst script exitted with an error because of the failure of install-info to find the file /usr/info/cpp.info.gz . This happened because after gcc failed to install all the way because of a dependency, I left it in place, installed some other packages, then did some housekeeping (deleting some info files), and only after a few days got back to configuring gcc. The configuration failed because I had removed the info files, so gcc.postinst failed, and the package remains unconfigured. Today, I try to install g77, after weeks of compiling w/ an unconfigured gcc, and it won't install because gcc has a file f2c.h. I ran dpkg again with --force-overwrite, and tried again. Now g77 still won't install because gcc isn't installed. I tried to use --force-depends, but this won't solve the problem cause the script is failing w/ each iteration. With all due respects, I will have to tweak the postinst file, and try again after removing the offending lines (ie. the two install-info's). I suppose that once this simple matter is figured out, a new version of either gcc or g77 or both, and probably also dpkg, will have to be issued. I won't know whether I ought to FTP them, since I won't know (without following the list) whether it is a major bugfix release or a change in the control files. All the same, debian is great. But I am certain this is not the last you will hear of these little inconsistencies. Alan Davis
