I mentioned the problem with setting up the stack on a new Solaris box yesterday and then realized this morning that I’d already added Brian Aker’s blog posting on the same issues to my queue (Solaris, HOW-TO, It works… Really…). Brian mentions pkg-get, the download solution from Blastwave which I neglected to mention yesterday. It certainly makes the downloading and installation easier, but its’s far from comprehensive and some of the stuff is out of date. To be honest I find that I install the stuff from Sun Freeware to get me going, then spend time recompiling everything myself by hand, for the plain and simple reason that I then know it is up to date and/or working or both. This is particularly the case for Perl, which often needs an update of the entire perl binary to get the updated versions of some CPAN modules. Ultimately, though, it sucks.