Updating Debian Wheezy breaks GCC

Sakis Kasampallis | Aug 25, 2011 min read

Quick hack to fix it

The latest update of Debian testing (aka Wheezy) breaks GCC, both version 4.x and 5.x:
#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{  
   return 0;
}

faif@isengard:~$ gcc --version
gcc (Debian 4.5.3-3) 4.5.3
faif@isengard:~$ gcc -o a a.c
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgcc_s
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
 
Well, the thing is that the "missing" library is already installed:
faif@isengard:~$ find / -name '*libgcc*' 2>/dev/null
/lib/libgcc_s.so.1

So, why (see 5.6) is this happening? Well, that's because someone forgot to add the relevant symbolic link. Thus a quick hack to fix the problem is:
faif@isengard:~$ sudo ln -s /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /lib/libgcc_s.so
faif@isengard:~$ gcc -o a a.c && echo voila!
voila!
faif@isengard:~$