Solaris, perl, and C compiler problems. by Alan Burlison

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