Whilst we obviously build the perl we ship as part of Solaris with our compilers (Forte C), cutomers often quite reasonably want to use gcc to build add-on modules from CPAN, and in fact we ship gcc on the companion CD that comes with Solaris.
However, at Configure time the compiler and flags are hard-coded into Config.pm, which means that using gcc isn't possible without surgery to Config.pm. Hacking up Config.pm to use gcc instead of Forte C seems to work OK, but obviously is just that - a hack. One possible solution that occurs to me is to allow overrides to Config.pm, either in a site-wide location (.../site_perl/.../SiteConfig.pm?) and/or a per-user location (~home/.PerlConfig.pm?) As well as allowing a different compiler to be specified, it could also be used, for example, to allow @INC to be tweaked to get round the 'My BOFH won't install module Root::Kit from CPAN' problem - it has always annoyed me that if you need to do this you either need to set PERL5LIB or bugger around with @INC in each and every script. To do this I suppose we would have to allow some subset of Configure functionality to be run post-install, and to do that we would have to decide which subset of Config.pm values it is reasonable to modify post install - for example I'm assuming the list would exclude all the multitude of library function probes or byteorder for example. Any thoughts? -- Alan Burlison -- $ head -1 /dev/bollocks metamorphose decoupled acknowledged road maps
