php and me don't get alone... help?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 18:40, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> On Thursday 30 November 2006 11:57, Madison Kelly wrote:
> > Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 29 November 2006 22:30, Madison Kelly wrote:
> > >>    Is this why PHP/MySQL are so popular together?
> > >
> > > I gave up looong time ago and when I install apache (and php,
> > > mysql, postgres, etc) I do that by compiling from sources. It
> > > is really simple to do and you are free. I would never trust
> > > installing these things from rpm or another apt-get.
> > >
> > > zb.
> >
> > That's an unfortunate statement, but understandable. You'd think
> > something as popular as PHP would have support for a DB server
> > like PostgreSQL. Is there any public rationale for such poor
> > support? I've never had trouble with Perl + PostgreSQL/MySQL and
> > can't fathom why PHP would. Oh well...
>
> The meaning of my message was not that PHP does not offer postgres
> support, as it is obviously clear by now from this thread.
>
> I wanted to point out that using rpm's etc is seldom the best way
> of installing and configuring these beasts. Why? PHP offers a lot
> of optional libraries. I am personally used to play with many, just
> for fun or purpose. And it is highly unlikely to find an rpm that
> would allow me to use just these libraries that I need. Besides,
> things change from distribution to distribution, from one php
> release version to another.
>
> Hence, I become independent of rpm's to avoid problems and
> confusion. I keep notes about every new installation of apache
> (with PHP, etc) I do and, believe me or not, after a few tens of
> times at least i did installation, I do not need to use these notes
> much ;) But after already making installation once, properly, one
> knows how to compile all this stuff and not worry about finding a
> proper rpm.

Why not rebuild the RPM instead? I've had to rebuild the Postfix RPM 
before to support PostgreSQL for authentication and it was trivially 
easy. I didn't have to pollute my system with stuff that is outside 
the package manager's control.

There are few exceptions to the general rule of always installing 
things using the native package format of the distro for me and 
Zope/Plone are two of them. I've found that the distro packages for 
both are usually quite bad and none that I've seen create a ZEO 
server and ZEO client by default so I end up doing that manually 
anyway. I'm trying Debian Etch on a few servers so learning how to 
create Debian packages is on the agenda. I can then create my own 
packages that use the post install scripts to create the ZEO server 
and ZEO client and create separate init scripts for the two.

One annoyance with Debian I've found is that very few of the init 
scripts support the "status" option so I can't do something like:

service apache2 status

like I can on an RPM based system. The only package I've found that 
supports the "status" option so far is PostgreSQL.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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