It's been a while - C++ and the case of the missing headers

Whilst trying to compile some code on my Linux box which, of course, is an IBM mainframe running Ubuntu, I was seeing this: -

/usr/include/features.h:424:12: fatal error: sys/cdefs.h: No such file or directory
 #  include
            ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

I'd started with a clean-but-minimised Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-36-generic s390x) environment, and had installed vim: -

sudo apt-get install vim

to create a test CPP source file: -

vi test.cpp

#include
#include
int main()
{
        printf("TESTING");
        return 1;
}

but, when I attempted to compile it: -

g++ --verbose -o test test.cpp 

I saw the previously quoted exception.

I checked that I had libc installed: -

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

sudo apt-get install libc6

I did check the missing file: -

sudo find / -name cdefs.h

which returned: -

/usr/include/sys/cdefs.h

ls -al /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Apr 16  2018 /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h -> ../s390x-linux-gnu/sys/cdefs.h

which gave me a clue ...

After some digging around, I found this: -

How do I find the package that provides a file?

on AskUbuntu, which referenced the apt-file command: -

sudo apt-get install apt-file

sudo apt-file update

Having installed it, I ran it: -

apt-file find cdefs.h|grep s390

which showed: -

libc6-dev: /usr/include/s390x-linux-gnu/sys/cdefs.h

libc6-dev-s390: /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h

libc6-dev-s390x-cross: /usr/s390x-linux-gnu/include/sys/cdefs.h

Taking a leap o' faith, I installed the s390 element of libc6-dev: -

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-s390

but to no avail.

I then did the same for the s390x-linux-gnu element: -

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-s390x-cross

which did the job.

I'm now able to compile my test module and, more importantly, I'm able to build the Docker image that led me down this particular rabbit hole ( as it uses LuaJIT )