[hardening-discuss] Bug#506066: hardening-wrapper: wrapper script hangs if corresponding gcc version is not installed.

[peter green]

package: hardening-wrapper
severity: important

For some reason in my i386 sid chroot I ended up with cc pointing at 
gcc-4.2 but gcc-4.2 not installed, I dunno exactly how this happened but 
given that this chroot is far from clean i'm not going to blame debian 
for it (heck I may have even set the link manually at some point in the 
past).

normally this would result in an obvious error but with hardening 
wrapper installed a gcc-4.2 binary is provided regardless of whether 
gcc-4.2 is installed. If gcc-4.2 is not installed the gcc-4.2 binary 
provided by hardening-wrapper simply hangs. Combine this with some tools 
not clearly indicating that they are running cc and you have a 
mysterious hang.

I have confirmed that the hang also happens in a much cleaner chroot if 
I try and run gcc-4.2 with hardening-wrapper installed but gcc-4.2 not 
installed.

I question if hardening-wrapper should be installing wrappers for 
compilers that aren't installed at all but if it does it should IMO at 
least give a meaningfull error rather than hanging.