Precise checking C compiler works... no

Things look better, but now something is inexpiable removing build depends. Is it due to the conflict installing the dummy package?

https://launchpad.net/~cheako/+archive/ubuntu/buildingrounds/+build/12072667

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/309515576/buildlog_ubuntu-precise-amd64.dpkg_1.17.27_BUILDING.txt.gz

Your original gcc issue was almost certainly because your build was passing options to gcc that precise's version didn't understand. The best thing to do is to arrange to cat config.log if configure fails, so that it shows up in the build log; later versions of debhelper do this automatically but I don't think precise's did.

The current failure looks kind of, uh, impossible:

Unpacking sbuild-build-depends-dpkg-dummy (from .../sbuild-build-depends-dpkg-dummy_0.invalid.0_amd64.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sbuild-build-depends-dpkg-dummy_0.invalid.0_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/DEBIAN/control', which is also in package sbuild-build-depends-core-dummy 0.invalid.0
No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/sbuild-build-depends-dpkg-dummy_0.invalid.0_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I'm retrying this build just in case this is a weird transient failure.

Still seems to be reproducible. My only guess is that the tar you have in that PPA is broken somehow, or at least incompatible with precise's dpkg; it might be worth removing that, waiting for the removal to be published, and then trying again.

The goal is to get gnunet from xenial 0.10.1-2.1build2. I'll have to step back and figure out the dependencies more exactly.

Forgot to mention travis.ci, that's why I'm doing all this.

https://github.com/cheako/gnunetircd
https://travis-ci.org/cheako/gnunetircd

I've removed tar and am still getting the removal of pkgs. Perhaps I'll test in an empty PPA.

Your tar removal hadn't finished publishing when you did your most recent build, as you can see from the build log:

Get:3 http://ppa.launchpad.net/cheako/buildingrounds/ubuntu/ precise/main tar amd64 1.28-2.1ubuntu0.1 [1113 kB]