OpenSolaris: How to Build CPAN Perl Modules with GCC Instead of the Sun Compiler

When building Perl modules with CPAN, the system assumes that the same compiler arguments that were used to compile Perl (indicated in the output of "perl -V") should be used to compile modules. However on OpenSolaris, Perl was compiled with the Sun C compiler, whereas the OS distributes GCC by default. This translates to an annoying situation: out of the box, when attempting to build a CPAN module, GCC will fail when encountering arguments CPAN passed to it that it does not recognize (the most prevalent error is "unrecognized option `-KPIC'"). The right solution is of course to install the Sun C compiler ("pkg install ss-dev") but this is 200MB+ of packages with tons of dependencies. A quicker and hackish workaround is to write a cc(1) wrapper that translates or ignores the 4 arguments that GCC does not support (-KPIC -xO3 -xspace -xildoff). I wrote such a wrapper. Put it in a temporary PATH location (eg. /root/bin) and run CPAN like this:

$ env PATH="/root/bin:$PATH" /usr/perl5/5.8.4/bin/cpan Crypt::SSLeay

Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/python
# cc(1) wrapper to build CPAN Perl modules with GCC on OpenSolaris. -mrb
import os, sys
path = '/usr/gnu/bin/cc'
args = []
i = 0
while i < len(sys.argv):
       if i == 0:
               args.append(path)
       elif sys.argv[i] == '-KPIC':
               args.append('-fPIC')
       elif sys.argv[i] == '-xO3':
               args.append('-O3')
       elif sys.argv[i] == '-xspace':
               pass
       elif sys.argv[i] == '-xildoff':
               pass
       else:
               args.append(sys.argv[i])
       i += 1
os.execv(path, args)