I'm currently in the process of writing setup instructions for some software I've written that is implemented as a set of Perl modules. Having done this for various flavours of Linux, I'm now doing the same for Solaris/OpenSolaris (v10 only).
Part of the setup process is to make sure that dependent Perl modules are installed. This has been pretty easy on Linux as the Perl modules I require tend to be within the distro's packaging system (eg yum install perl-Cache-Cache).
This is not the case on Solaris so I'm working on setup instructions that use the CPAN module to fetch dependent modules (eg perl -MCPAN -e 'install Cache::Cache'). This works ok but there are known problems with modules that require things to be built with a C compiler.
The problem is that the C Makefile generated assumes you're using Sun's compiler and uses command-line options not understood by gcc, which you may be using instead. Consulting teh Internetz has thrown up a number of solutions to this:
- Install and use Sun's compiler
- Use the
perlgccwrapper script - Edit the makefiles by hand (yuk)
All of these work. My question to those more familiar with Solaris than me is: Is one of these the 'best' or 'most commonly used' method?
Take a look at OpenCSW. With pkgutil you have a apt/yum-like way to install the packages you need. We have Perl 5.10.1 and almost 500 Perl modules and we will build more if you need them.
www.opencsw.org