Trashing the OS of "Developers"

Sun would really like Solaris to re-capture the hearts of developers since loosing so many to Linux. They are certainly making strides in the right direction with their Open Source strategy. However sometimes the creakiness of the code does show up.

I've spent the best part of the day trying to get the mpstat command to build and still haven't gotten any closer. One of the reasons is you can't quite build things out of the box. Although gcc has been shipping in /usr/sfw for a while you can't just go and start building tools with it. You need a 40 lines of environment variables set up as well as additional packages installed. Even then the compiler wrapper script can throw up weird and wonderful errors that looks like it really didn't believe you wanted to build with gcc (and not with Sun Studio).

It's rare in the Linux world that I've not been able to build a random user space command with ./configure; make. It's true that you usually have to specify the installation of gcc when you install a distribution however it's never more than an apt-get/emerge/yum away. Linux is still my favourite development environment.