[csw-maintainers] compiler vs compiler

[Ben Walton]

Hi All,

I bumped an issue tonight that may warrant a bit of discussion.  I'm
not sure there is a good, global, solution for this, but lets see what
people think.

In preparing the ruby update to match the specs we set in Dublin, I
went to test building a native gem.  On my test box, I installed the
CSWruby18-gcc4 package that gives me a gcc4 compatible rbconfig.rb.  I
then went to build the mysql gem with: gem install mysql --
--with-mysql-config=/opt/csw/mysql5/bin/mysql_config.

(The first issue I hit is that on the isaexec pulled in the 64-bit
version while ruby is currently 32-bit only...side issue).

Running it as: gem install mysql --
--with-mysql-config=/opt/csw/mysql5/bin/sparcv8/mysql_config still
throws errors as the --cflags argument to that binary returns values
suitable for the sun compiler set since that's what it was built with.

As our policy is to build with sun cc when possible, this is not an
easy problem to work around.  I don't think it's the wrong policy
either, but it certainly has downsides.  It almost forces sites
wanting to build locally to use sun cc.

Is there a way to build with sun cc but not tie our users to it?
(This now costs them an extra support contract.)  Having all
packages provide gcc4-compatible *-config type binaries might help,
but that's no small feat.

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302