Compiling for CPAN not possible on raspbian?

Question

I'm trying to install the Perl module Linux::Inotify2. The installation requires some C compiling.

Which compiler CPAN uses is the same one Perl was compiled with. Which one that is can be seen with:

perl -MConfig -le 'print "@Config{ qw/cc ccflags/ }"'

Which comes up:

gcc-4.7 -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DDEBIAN -fstack-protector -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64

Now that seems to be a big problem for me because the latest gcc included in raspbian is 4.6!

As a result, when I try to install Linux::Inotify2, I get failures simply because:

/bin/sh: 1: gcc-4.7: not found

How can I get around this? Shouldn't Perl have been compiled with gcc-4.6 for raspbian if a newer version wasn't included? Do I have to install gcc-4.7 on my Pi?

Update:

Just making a symlink for gcc-4.7 that points to gcc-4.6 seems to be a decent workaround. Though I know this isn't ideal.

Answer 1

It's in the Raspbian repository, so you can install it with

sudo apt-get install liblinux-inotify2-perl

Bringing in modules from CPAN can affect the stability of a Debian distribution (they have conflicting policies on file modifications), so I don't recommend it unless you absolutely have to.

Answer 2

gcc-4.6 is the default compiler in Debian 6.0; Raspian is a port of Debian 6.0. It is not the only version available, though. You can install different versions, including 4.7 with apt-get install gcc-4.7.

Now, you said that CPAN modules are compiled with the same version perl was compiled with. It is very possible that perl on Raspbian was compiled with gcc-4.7, then. Raspbian developers tend to use this workaround - using a newer version of gcc - when they get some compilers errors building the package.