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chain effect of package installation failures



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 



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