Lots of customers have tried to upgrade your Mongrel gems (its installed by default, although its currently 2 revs behind) only to run into a brick wall. 1 of 3 things can happen:

1) Rake can't find "make". Solaris hides "make" in /usr/ccs/bin with the other dev tools, such as ld, you can use the Solaris version of make by adding that directory to your path. Alternatively, you can use GNU Make found in /opt/csw/bin, as 'gmake'. In your container we symlink that to /usr/bin/make, but if for some reason its not present either alias the command ('alias make=/opt/csw/bin/gmake'), use 'gmake' instead of 'make', or even symlink gmake to make yourself.

2) Problems involving the "install" command. Similar to the 'make' wierdness, Solaris places 'install' in the '/usr/ucb' directory (BSD compatability tools, UCB stands for UC Berkely). Either add that directory to your path, or deal with the GNU version ('/opt/csw/bin/ginstall') in the same way as we did with make above.

3) The most common problem involves "cc" not being found. This is a by-product of the fact that we offer Blastwave packages (www.blastwave.org). Blastwave builds all of its packages with the Sun Studio compiler, which is great except that we can't install that compiler in your zone due to licensing problems (despite the fact that its free) and since Ruby was built with 'cc' it tries to use it again in the future.

We've assisted users who've submitted tickets with the 'cc' problem typically by NFS mounting the Studio Compiler Suite (/opt/SUNWspro) into your zone and having you add it to your path. In many cases I feel bad about this happening and I just finish install the gem myself on the customers behalf.

There are, however, other ways to deal with this problem. One way is to over-ride the variables supplied by Ruby by editing extconf.rb in the directory with the Makefile (in the case of Mongrel that'd typically be: /opt/csw/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-0.3.13.4/ext/http11/. In this method you add the appropriate variables to extconf.rb, execute it ('ruby extconf.rb') and then re-attempt your 'make'. That works, its fine and well, but its going to happen again in the future.

The best method is to fix all the default parameters that Ruby uses, which are found in: /opt/csw/lib/ruby/1.8/(ARCH)/rbconfig.rb. Here's a diff between the Sun Studio version and my modified GCC version:

# diff /opt/csw/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-solaris2.8/rbconfig.rb.default /opt/csw/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-solaris2.8/rbconfig.rb.gcc-ized

13c13

<   CONFIG["INSTALL"] = "/export/home/comand/bin/install -c"

---

>   CONFIG['INSTALL'] = "/usr/ucb/install"

61,63c61,63

<   CONFIG["CC"] = "cc"

<   CONFIG["CFLAGS"] = "-xO3 -xarch=386 -xspace -xildoff -I/opt/csw/include  -I/opt/csw/include   -KPIC"

<   CONFIG["LDFLAGS"] = " -xarch=386 -L/opt/csw/lib  -L/opt/csw/lib "

---

>   CONFIG["CC"] = "/opt/csw/gcc3/bin/gcc"

>   CONFIG["CFLAGS"] = "-g -O2"

>   CONFIG["LDFLAGS"] = "-L/opt/csw/lib  -L/opt/csw/lib"

66c66

<   CONFIG["CPP"] = "cc -E"

---

>   CONFIG["CPP"] = "/opt/csw/gcc3/bin/gcc -E"

91,92c91,92

<   CONFIG["CCDLFLAGS"] = " -KPIC"

<   CONFIG["LDSHARED"] = "ld -G"

---

>   CONFIG["CCDLFLAGS"] = " -fPIC"

>   CONFIG["LDSHARED"] = "$(CC) -Wl,-G"

98c98

<   CONFIG["RPATHFLAG"] = " -R'%1$-s'"

---

>   CONFIG["RPATHFLAG"] = " -Wl,-R'%1$-s'"

111,112c111,112

<   CONFIG["XLDFLAGS"] = " -R$(libdir) -L."

<   CONFIG["LIBRUBY_LDSHARED"] = "ld -G"

---

>   CONFIG["XLDFLAGS"] = "  -L."

>   CONFIG["LIBRUBY_LDSHARED"] = "$(CC) -Wl,-G"

After making these changes dont' bother messing with the code, just re-install the Gem ('gem install mongrel') and it should succeed. Furthermore, it shouldn't be a problem anymore in the future.

In all new containers I'm applying this as a patch over the stock configuration. For existing customers you'll need to fix this yourself or request the fix in a ticket, giving us authorization to over-write your existing rbconfig.rb.

If your too lazy to edit the file I've put up a properly edited version here: http://www.cuddletech.com/rbconfig.rb You can simply move your existing rbconfig.rb away and wget that file down in its place.