Building Perl CPAN modules on Solaris

The CPAN Perl module has a very convenient shell for downloading and installing modules, with one simple command.

Everything works also on Solaris, as long as you are installing "pure Perl" modules; if the module requires some additional C language components, you enter a compiler version nightmare:

The Perl interpreter embeds the compilation flags used to build it (look at the output of perl -V), and every additional module is built with the same configuration flags;
The Perl interpreter shipped with Solaris 10 (and the one provided by BlastWave.org's CSW also!) are compiled with the Sun Studio cc;
Sun does no longer ship Sun Studio cc with Solaris 10, they bundle GNU gcc instead;
gcc and cc use a different set of command-line options.

The problem has been known for so long on Solaris, that there is even a CPAN module perlgcc which installs a new set of Perl configuration files to work with gcc, but it doesn't work with Perl 5.8 (the one shipped with Solaris 10).

Googling for the issue hasn't been of much help (except for a few other rants on this topic - we're not alone :-)), until I found this blog post which explains that one can simply remove the conflicting options and get a working Perl module.

So, I wrote a perlcc script, which removes the offending options and invokes gcc instead. I installed perlcc as /usr/bin/cc on the Solaris boxes, and -voila- cpan -i Time::HiRes is now working...

-- RiccardoMurri - 20 Nov 2008