Building current gcc on Solaris 10

While Solaris 10 comes with gcc, it's quite an old version. For some modern code, you need to use a newer version - this is the case in my Node.js for Solaris builds, for example.

Actually building a current gcc on Solaris 10 turns out to be reasonably straightforward but, as in most things, there's a twist. So the follwoing is the procedure I've used successfully to get 4.6.X built.

You first need to download the release tarball from http://gcc.gnu.org/, and unpack it:

bzcat /path/to/gcc-4.6.2.tar.bz2 | gtar xf -

There are 3 prerequisites: gmp (4.3.2), mpfr (2.4.2), and mpc (0.8.1). However, you should use the specific version mentioned, which may not be the current versions. Conveniently, there's a copy of the right versions on ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/infrastructure/. Go into the gcc source, unpack them, and rename them to remove the version numbers.

cd gcc-4.6.2

bzcat /path/to/gmp-4.3.2.tar.bz2 | gtar xf -
mv gmp-4.3.2 gmp

zcat /path/to/mpfr-2.4.2.tar.bz2 | gtar xf -
mv mpfr-2.4.2 mpfr
gzcat /path/to/mpc-0.8.1.tar.gz | gtar xf -
mv mpc-0.8.1 mpc

cd ..

You have to build from outside the tree. If you followed the above, you'll be in the parent to gcc-4.6.2. Create a build directory and change into it:

mkdir build
cd build

Then you're ready to configure and build:

env PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH ../gcc-4.6.2/configure \

--prefix=/usr/local/versions/gcc-4.6.2 \

--enable-languages=c,c++,fortran

env PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH gmake -j 4
env PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH gmake install

There are three things to note here.

First is that I'm installing it into a location that is specific to this particular version of gcc. You don't have to, but I maintain large numbers of different versions of all sorts of applications, so they always live in their own space. You can put symlinks into a common location if necessary.

The second is one of the key tricks: I just build c, c++, and fortran. They're the only languages I actually need, and the build dies spectacularly with other languages enabled.

The third is that I force /usr/bin to the front of the PATH. Not ucb, and not xpg4 either.

You'll have to wait a while (and then some), but hopefully when that's all finished you'll have a modern compiler installed that will make building modern software such as Node.js much easier.