Here's a few thoughts on how to proceed with SFWNV Ruby support for native gems - comments are appreciated.
Ruby maintains data about it's build information(like compiler location, linker paths, flags etc.,) in a file called rbconfig.rb. When the end user installs a gem that includes native code, the stored build information is used to compile/link the native code. Now, with OpenSolaris, the environment that is used to build Ruby is not available to end users(unless you're in Sun and have mounted the appropriate nfs locations). Hence Ruby needs to be configured with information about a compiler that is available on the OS installation that Ruby is bundled with. Another issue that we've seen is that native gems tend to use $CFLAGS that are specific to a certain compiler. So, in order to make using Ruby as easy as possible to folks with different preferences, we're considering packaging two versions of rbconfig.rb, one tailor made for gcc, and the other for Sun Studio. rbconfig.rb will be a symlink, and point to the gcc configuration. This is to make it seamless for a user of native Ruby gems like MySQL, Postgres etc., to get started without needing to learn about compiler locations/flags and the nitty-gritty. The Studio configuration is for users who tend to have Sun Studio already installed on their systems - they get to use this by manually changing the rbconfig.rb symlink to point to rbconfig.rb.sun_studio -ps -- Prashant Srinivasan F/OSS Enthusiast Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://blogs.sun.com/prashant GnuPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x82FBDE5A
